Research and development issues for interactive electronic technical manuals

The Capable Manpower program of the Office of Naval Research's Future Naval Capabilities program is supporting research addressing the needs of the technical manual community. While there is a wide range of research issues associated with technical manuals, the focus of the Intelligent Performance Support and Training effort is the development and evaluation of various technologies to support Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs). A workshop was conducted at the NAVAIR Orlando, Training Systems Division to discuss the domain and to present current research in this area. The purpose of this report is to document the proceedings of the workshop and further define the goals, technologies, and issues related to this research effort. Specific research areas include the use of device models and intelligent tutors, the application of Latent Semantic Analysis for search and navigation within an IETM, and spoken language interfaces and wearable computers to support hands-free use.