Patent ID: 8370741

Claim:
A method of developing a hybrid interactive electronic technical manual, the method comprising: identifying a plurality of sub-elements in technical data for a device, wherein a sub-element comprises a portion of technical data associated with a maintenance task for the device, wherein the technical data is associated with a non-interactive native file format; selecting a set of sub-elements associated with core maintenance tasks from the plurality of sub-elements to form a set of core sub-elements, wherein a core sub-element comprises a portion of technical data associated with a basic functionality or basic infrastructure for a hybrid interactive electronic technical manual, and the core maintenance tasks including at least one of part removal procedures, part installation procedures, and device test procedures; identifying sub-elements remaining in the plurality of sub-elements to form a set of remaining sub-elements; retrieving maintenance history information for the device from a plurality of operators to form maintenance history data; performing a cost-benefit analysis on the each sub-element in the set of remaining sub-elements using maintenance history data for the device to identify a sub-element benefit rating for the each sub-element in the set of remaining sub-elements, wherein the benefit rating includes at least one of a number of maintenance procedures performed for the sub-element and a number of fault codes generated for the sub-element in the set of remaining sub-elements; selecting sub-elements in the set of remaining sub-elements having a sub-element rating greater than or equal to a threshold benefit rating to form a set of high benefit sub-elements, wherein sub-elements in the set of remaining sub-elements having a sub-element rating below the threshold benefit rating form a set of unconverted sub-elements; and converting the set of core sub-elements and the set of high benefit sub-elements from the non-interactive native file format to an interactive electronic technical manual database format and generating a set of links to the set of unconverted sub-elements to form the hybrid interactive electronic technical manual, wherein each link in the set of links is a link to a subset of unconverted sub-elements in the technical data in the non-interactive native file format.