A technical e-doc application has been developed in a prospective approach for a sub-system being part of a global military program. To reduce the global possession cost of the technical users documentation of this program, whose 100 000 pages and 10 000 illustrations will have to be maintained for more than 25 years, it was decided to give up costly paper standards. The aim of the prototype now developed is first to validate the e-doc production automated process, and secondly to propose the users an ergonomic e-doc application, he could react on to improve the specifications of the future global e-doc system.

This paper aims at presenting this SGML/CGM project for technical e-doc in the context of the functional needs and the immediate benefits XML and its companion standards brought to it.

The scope of the project is to cover illustrated parts catalog, descriptive, maintenance documentation, including all needed sets of associated logistics and technical data (task duration and level, spares, manufacturer).

The project lead to the development of an e-doc database being built from the input technical data linked to the documentation items. The e-doc database uses a lightweight database engine. It is calculated from input data and linked to documents using an SGML-aware transformation engine.