THE PROTOCOL

PURPOSE

Shipdex™ is the International Business Rules (The Shipdex™ Protocol) developed to standardize the development and the exchange of technical and logistic data within the shipping community.
The Shipdex™ Protocol applies to S1000D™ at issue 2.3 (www.s1000d.org).
The Shipdex™ Protocol stands for Business Rules and Technical Specifications to assure a high quality of technical and logistics data and the data exchange between Ship-owners, Shipyards, Manufacturers and Application Service Providers. For Application Service Providers it is a basic specification to implement data interfaces from Technical Manuals Solutions to Maintenance and Purchase Systems.

SCOPE

Shipdex™ Protocol covers technical data exchange in any sea project which wishes to adopt it. Shipdex™ Protocol applies to the "S1000D™ International Specification for technical publication utilizing a common source database" issue 2.3 to exchange data in a neutral and standardized format. This means that it can be implemented by anyone on different Information Technology systems. This feature, along with the concept of modularization, makes Shipdex™ Protocol acceptable to the international shipping community.

Information produced in accordance with Shipdex™ Protocol is achieved in a modular form, called a "data module", which is defined as "the smallest self contained information unit within a Shipdex™ data set". Shipdex™ Protocol defines data modules as containers for data exchange.
The data module types that Shipdex™ Protocol makes use are:
  • Descriptive
  • Procedural
  • Illustrated Parts Data (IPD)
All data modules that are applicable to the Product may be gathered and managed in a database, which is hereafter referred to as the Common Source Data Base (CSDB). Information is not duplicated in the CSDB although individual data modules can be used many times in the output. Savings are therefore made in the maintenance of the data in that it only needs to be changed once, whilst the changed information appears throughout the output.

CRITERIA

The Shipdex™ Protocol specification criteria is to provide the final user with essential, complete and non-redundant technical information, whose main documentation contents are strictly linked to logistic studies (if any) or equivalent analysis and related maintenance strategies.

The documents contents are gathered in an organic way, with a different structure depending on the type of data dealt with, in Data Modules (DMs) that represent the macro-information components. Each DM corresponds to a specific, uniquely identified, electronic file produced with XML language, allowing to structure and identify each individual information contained in the DM itself.
Each Data Module contains data supplied in XML format and can refer:
  • Other Data Modules
  • Information objects (illustrations, symbols, multimedia objects)
  • External documents (PDF)


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