IIRDS at Siemens
Siemens Digital Industries offers innovative technology and products for industrial automation and digitization. They serve to increase flexibility and optimize production processes in the discrete industry and process industry.
From SIPS+ to iiRDS
Siemens DI creates and maintains its technical documentation with the in-house-editorial-system SIPS+. The contents are administered modular and are provided with various metadata. Ideal condition for the first step towards iiRDS.
“Can you develop a converter for iiRDS?” Siemens asked after we already had developed another converter for documents exported from SIPS+. The goal was not yet a productive application, but exploring the feasibility and gathering experience with the implementation of iiRDS.
SIPS+ exports documents as data packages with all modules and a special file that displays the structure of the document and references the individual modules. This structure file also contains the metadata for the document and the modules.
Our converter converts a SIPS+ data packet into an iiRDS packet. The main task is to create the iiRDS metadata file. In addition, the modules are converted to HTML5 format in accordance with the iiRDS- specifications for iiRDS / A-packages. That's the first step in the matter of iiRDS. Due to the positive experiences more will follow with almost certainty.
Configuration file for metadata
Of course the metadata in SIPS+ is called differently than in iiRDS and has different values. In order to keep the conversion flexible a configuration file contains the mapping of the metadata and values of SIPS+ and those from iiRDS. This makes the conversion easy to adjust and vary without having to intervene in the programming.
Metadata acquisition through linguistic analysis
Not all metadata provided in iiRDS are already maintained in SIPS+. Therefore, our partner IAI (IAI Linguistic Content AG) contributes further metadata with the help of its linguistic analysis methods. The IAI analyzes certain content from the SIPS + documents. The metadata obtained in this way are included in the iiRDS package via our converter.