iiRDS stands for "intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard“ and was published by tekom in version 1.0 on 18.04.2018
The aim was the standardized provision and query of technical documentation beyond company boundaries. An extensive metadata concept enables the targeted queries of information for a specific task as well as its tailor-made provision.
For full unfolding of iiRDS possibilities, the documentation must be organized topic-based.
Topics are self-contained pieces of information units that answer a reader's question without (ideally) to fall back on other topics.
A collection of topics replaces the classic book form, in which contents are presented in hierarchically structured chapters. It is much better suited to give the reader in digital systems exactly the information he needs at that time.
iiRDS provides a large amount of metadata for different product and usage aspects. This includes information item, product variant, component, product life cycle phase, qualification, topic type and more.
Enriching the topics of a documentation with this metadata makes it “intelligent“. The metadata can now be used to automatically determine and provide exactly the topics required for a particular task.
iiRDS describes the metadata and its assignment to topics using the modelling language RDF scheme. The iiRDS scheme describes resources relevant for technical documentation and their relationship.
Key resource is the Information Unit. It stands for either a package, a document, a topic or a fragment. Each information unit additionally has functional metadata and product metadata such as e.g. required tools, maintenance intervals, or product variants.
The query and delivery of documentation in iiRDS is done through iiRDS packages. Such a package contains the metadata in a single metadata file as well as the content.
iiRDS knows two types of packages. iiRDS/A-packages restrict the contents to certain formats, e.g. XHTML5 for text, SVG for vector graphics, etc. Non-iiRDS/A-packages can contain content of any format.
From a technical point of view, iiRDS packages are ZIP files.
