Enhanced Understandability and Effectiveness for Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Automatic Logistic Products

Keeping Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) flying places great expectations on technical manuals and courseware, because it depends on a vast, complex information infrastructure. Information must be more easily understood, more easily located, and betterintegrated. Mere digitization of paper is not sufficient. More consistent and clear language is needed; better retrieval mechanisms are needed; tighter integration between technical manuals and courseware is needed; information repositories must migratefrom classrooms and libraries to just-in-time, job-specific assistance online on site. Also, because JSF is international, a need arises for translation to British English and to foreign languages. Yet all of these enhancements imply increased productioncosts and delays; so commensurate effort must be devoted to simplify and expedite the production process. Sonalysts proposes to leverage existing U.S. Navy research on technical manual and courseware authoring and delivery tools to explore the feasibilityof adding Simplified English authoring, conversion to British English and a foreign language, and semantic tagging and retrieval for both technical manuals and courseware. Additionally, Sonalysts and Boeing propose to join forces, leveraging Boeing'ssuperiority in Simplified English and linguistics. Together, we will define requirements for semantic authoring and retrieval tools, with applicability to the JSF Autonomic Logistics System.