Technical Documentation with Infonyte DB

XML as an effective simplification of SGML constitutes the ideal basis for IETM (Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals). Inheriting from SGML, XML provides the a number of advantages.

• Quality control: Simple, yet powerful validation tools help in enforcing corporate documentation standards.
• Exchange: Internationally accepted document types (e.g. AECMA or DocBook) facilitate communication with suppliers and distributed authors.
• Reuse: By separating logical structure from layout XML supports single source publishing to multiple media (print manuals, CD-ROM, Web).

Moreover, XML has been adopted much more widely than SGML. Therefore, there exists a broad and costeffective suite of tools for creating, processing, and deploying XML documents. In addition, also production data are increasingly maintained and exchanged by means of XML, which gradually breaks the technical barriers between production processes and documentation processes.

However, when deploying XML for large data volumes, prevalent XML processors quickly reach their limits. Therefore, large documents, such as part catalogues, cannot be queried and processed directly, but require the tedious integration of a database management system that typically does not support the complex and often irregular document structures needed for technical documentation.

With Infonyte-DB you are equipped with a light-weight, performant, platform independent (100% Java), native XML database that supports the prevalent XML Standards for processing and changing (W3C-DOM), validation (XML-DTDs), searching (XPath, XQL extended with text search), and transforming (XSLT) in a fully scalable fashion. Infonyte-DB can be integrated seamlessly into your XML documentation process on the server as well as on the client:

On the server, Infonyte-DB can be easily coupled with existing editorial and authoring systems (e.g. via the WebDAV protocol) to realize a central XML repository (Common Source Database, CSDB). On this basis, large documents and document collections can be maintained, queried, shared and published in a scalable and transaction safe fashion.

On the client, Infonyte-DB together with any XML-enabled standard web-browser is an ideal basis for interactive electronic manuals, which support comfortable querying based on logical document structure and content, individualized presentation, and effective updates. Due to its small footprint and its compact binary format, Infonyte-DB can be deployed even on PDAs with only 32 MB RAM.

Contact: info@infonyte.com