IETM Vs. IETP. Is There Any Difference?

ITEM stands for Interactive Electronic
Technical Manual. It is a technical manual which could relate to maintenance,
user, training, operations that are prepared or ‘authored’ in the digital
format on a suitable medium with the help of an automated authoring system. It
designed to be used for electronic screen display to the end-user.

What Are The Critical Characteristics Of IETM?

The format and style of the presented
document or the information are enhanced for the screen presentation. It leads
to maximum comprehension. It also means the presentation is frame oriented and
the page-oriented. The various elements of the technical information that makes
for the technical manual are highly inter-related. It also means that the users’
access to the needed information is facilitated to the most considerable extent
possible. It is achieved following several paths. The display devices like the
computers and the laptops can interact with the user who also means that they
can respond the user requests and the information input. So, these can provide
procedural guidance, navigation directions and also provide additional
information. The screen presentations include the material that is derived from
the data stored in the textual, graphical, audio or video form in a relational
database. It is composed of logically connected but the IETM elements that are randomly connected.

IETP or Interactive Electronic Technical Publication

S1000D define it an asset of information
that is required for description, operation and maintenance of the product, that
is optimally arranged and is formatted for the best interactive on-screen
presentation to the end-user on an electronic display device. The IETP includes
the conditional branching mechanisms that can be based on the feedback of the
user. The parameters are evaluated at the run-time, and their values depend on
the context and input from the user—the functionality of the IETM systems.

Classes of IETM Systems

The functionality of the systems is broken
into five classes. However, these are like points in the spectrum of the
features with most real-world products coming somewhere in between the two
classes.

• Class I.
  It follows the structure and the format of a printed book that contains
  the indexes and table of contents which are hyperlinked into the content
  of the document. It might be scanned book which contains some additional links.
• Class II.
  In includes some more hyperlinks than Class I like the figures, tables,
  and section references—for instance, a hyperlinked PDF. The document would
  be authored in the XML/SGML.
• Class
  III. The difference between the IETM Class II and Class III, which is
  similar to the difference between the PDF book and a website. The
  structure of the book is discarded instead of the document takes the form
  more freely following the logic of the content. While the document can be
  printed, but it would match the presentation on the screen. The document
  would be authored in the mark-up language, which could be SGML.

• Class IV.
  In this class, the data could be stored in a relational database format.
  It offers the benefit of data integrity and removal of data redundancy.
  The relationships in the content are presented in the form of hyperlinks,
  and they are mapped directly to the relationships in the database schema. The
  redundancies in the data that exist in the previous classes have to be
  removed. The sequence is also different. There are no static pages. The
  content can change directionbased on user navigation and the ways it is
  input through the content.

Finally,

The S1000D IETP is built on the outlined
functionality, which is described in the S1000D Matrix. It shows the various
level of complexity. The costs are on the higher side.