An employee working for a large information technology company is in a predicament. In order to properly perform his job (that is crucial to national security), he is in desperate need of the most technically up-to-date information available. Using the incorrect information could cost hundreds of lives and / or millions of dollars. Although a wealth of information is available to him through an intranet, the Internet and paper, how can he be sure what he finds is the most current, technically accurate data?

Who is this person; an analyst with the CIA? Perhaps a field agent with the FBI? Or maybe an imagery specialist assigned to the Homeland Defense Agency? NO, this person is a US Navy submarine sailor operating a nuclear reactor; or a jet engine mechanic maintaining an F-14 Tomcat on the deck of an aircraft carrier, or one of thousands of at sea and shore-based Navy personnel that require technical data and training products to do their jobs everyday.

Like Fortune 500 companies and the dot com industry, the US Navy is also adopting XML to improve business processes and describe their informational assets. This is especially evident within the Navy’s submarine, sea and air communities in the development of technical data and training products. Previous digitization efforts centered on SGML, proprietary training products and CD ROM delivery. While highly successful, this process created a) numerous configuration management problems, b) a knowledge management nightmare and c) a lack of source data interoperability within the tech data and training communities.

One effort within the Navy’s tech data community is focusing on developing an Integrated Data Environment to deliver the correct data to the correct person whenever and wherever requested. This Technical Data Knowledge Management (TDKM) IDE will feature an advanced content management and control system architecture allowing for the management, versioning, distribution, and control of electronic documents at the sub-document, information object level. Central to the TDKM-IDE will be a Warfare Community Knowledge Management System built upon commercially available enterprise management software, which will serve as a knowledge broker between the fleet end user digital library and the various content repositories maintained by and for the Navy shore establishment. Content stores, populated by XML data suppliers, will also produce rich, descriptive XML metadata indices for configuration management, versioning and keyword searching through a TDKM interface. Employing these instruments, TDKM will pull the necessary data objects from the distributed content management systems; assemble a user digital technical data library collection (or update to the existing library) according to the needs identified by the user profile(s); and push this collection of technical data and/or incremental updates to the user site.

The Navy’s training community is also taking a hard look at XML, specifically as it applies to the efforts of the Advanced Distributed Learning program under the Sharable Content Object Reference Model initiative. SCORM proposes to describe individual learning objects (called SCOs) with XML metadata, then package SCOs and supporting files into a manifest file (also in XML). Any SCORM compliant Learning Management System can then read the resulting manifest file to and display its contents an end user in a web browser. The Navy is investigating if this concept can be applied to tech data elements and if so, how can the tech data and training communities use this concept to facilitate a greater re-use of XML-based source data.