Building an Extensible Data Model for Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals

An interactive electronic technical manual (IETM) is a digital document designed to operate interactively with the user. In order to organize lots of technical data in IETMs, an IETM data model is needed. In this paper, we propose an extensible IETM data model which consists of a minimal set of data types to define the core processing logic of IETM browsers. Domain-specific data types are created as specializations of existing types and are allowed to reuse the existing processing logic. Our development experiences show that the data model greatly reduces the implementation complexity of IETM processing engines.