“The Bridge Project” meeting, sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) Reduction in Total Ownership Costs (RTOC), brought together more than two dozen participants to continue work on S1000D and SCORM harmonization. The group met from 14 - 17 September 2009 at the Alexandria Co-Lab Hub. Wayne Gafford, Director of ADL’s Job Performance Technology Center (JPTC), chaired the meeting.

“The Bridge Project” aims to integrate SCORM-based learning content development environments with common source databases (CSDB) used by the technical data community. The strategy offers a solution to a common content management challenge.  A recent Navy report identified that 70% of all changes to Navy training content are the direct result of changes to hull, mechanical, electrical and other systems and components. Meeting attendees viewed demonstrations of several authoring tools and discussed the impacts of S1000D and SCORM integration requirements.

In addition to building a bridge between learning development tools and CSDBs, “The Bridge Project” Team developed concept maps that outline key training decision processes. Concept maps address “When is training needed?”, “What is the lifecycle of training?”, “How is the training need identified?”, and “How is training designed?”. The concept maps will be associated with training- and performance-needs analysis objects identified in the S1000D learning data modules.

Other meeting outcomes included a stabilized Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and a plan for testing the Bridge application programming interface (API).

The September Bridge Project meeting also allowed the team to finalize several change proposals for the S1000D Specification to align it with SCORM requirements. The team presented the proposals to the S1000D Electronic Publications Working Group, which approved the change proposals so they can proceed to the next step of revising the affected chapters in the S1000D specification.

The change proposals addressed these issues:

• Adding completion / fill-in-the-blank-type questions to the assessment branch of the learning data module
• Aligning the learning data module schema with Human Performance Technology practices, such as including learning objectives
• Splitting the S1000D SCORM content package module (SCPM) into two parts to separate the structure information from the content reference
• Revising the <XPath> placement and structure to better reflect S1000D guidance.

S1000D, an industry-based technical data specification, fills many training life cycle support gaps by using modular XML files to name, structure, and map curricula to actual systems and components. Using S1000D for all technical information that supports a common system enhances reuse opportunities.

Wayne Gafford will be presenting “The Bridge Project” at the 2009 S1000D User Forum, 12 - 15 October, in Hilton Head, South Carolina, USA, and at the ADL booth at I/ITSEC 2009 in Orlando Florida, USA, 30 November – 3 December.