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The EDIDOC project at the European Space Agency (ESA)

The EDIDOC project at ESA attempts to merge the functionalities of electronic data interchange with those of electronic document engineering. It uses SGML to exchange in electronic format documentation within ESA, and between ESA and its different industrial partners.

The European Space Community, i.e. the people working inside ESA, in industry or in associated technical and scientific organisations, is large and diverse. Today, more than 3,500 different users work with diverse proprietary computer systems, mainly mainframe-based. Both for the technical work itself and for the administration of the projects and programmes, very large volumes of documents are shipped back and forth between these users.

As in most organisations, the use of electronic documents is now widespread at the drafting, writing and publishing level. However, the bewildering variety of computer operating systems, document processing software, means of communications and data storage systems makes it at present very difficult (and in many cases even impossible) to exchange, reformat and reprocess electronic documents.

This is why, last February, the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and DOCumentation management or EDIDOC project has been launched by ESA. The overall objective of this project is to make the exchange and use of documentation within ESA, and between ESA and its industrial partners, more efficient, rapid and accurate, by extending the principles and techniques of EDI to the domain of documentation management.

The development of a generic system, called EDIDOC server, has just been started, which will provide functionality in six main areas:

• to be a clearing-house service based on the X.400 and X.435 international standards for electronic mail, to support the exchange of large compound documents (using SGML) and of administrative and financial documents (using EDIFACT and/or SGML). The EDIDOC server will perform the necessary control and acknowledgment of the end-to-end communications. It will also be responsible for the conformance-checking of the contents and the structure of every incoming document against pre-defined SGML DTDs or EDIFACT message types, generating the necessary notifications in case of a problem.
• to provide communication gateway services: although X.400 is scheduled, in the medium term, to become the only communication protocol allowed by ESA, during an intermediary phase gateways will be used to allow ESA partners not yet equipped with an X.400 facility to keep on using their FTP or SMTP based tools for accessing EDIDOC.
• to be an archiving service, based on the logging of all significant communication events (messages and notifications) and data (message envelopes and document descriptors), and allowing the tracking and the management of end-to-end transactions.
• to provide data gateway services: although SGML and EDIFACT will become, in the medium term, the only formats allowed by ESA, conversion utilities for proprietary document formats will be integrated in the EDIDOC server to allow users (typically small ESA contractors) to continue using their proprietary document management systems to interact with EDIDOC.Utilities for 2-way conversion will be made available for the following proprietary formats: MS-Word, MS-Project, FrameMaker and WordPerfect.
• to provide security services which will guarantee the protection of the intellectual property rights of the users related to documents contents, and which will meet the legal and contractual requirements required for the exchange of documents between ESA partners. These security services include a.o. support for document signature, integrity, confidentiality, and non-repudiation of sending and receipt actions. They are based on the intensive use of encryption techniques.
• to make available on an optional basis workflow control services which support the tracking and control of complex transactions, such as the formal review of a document or the management of a complete document life-cycle, using e-mail based groupware techniques.

A key added value of EDIDOC is to provide ESA with an enabling technology by which it can play the role of a neutral trusted third party in terms of enabling, moderating and auditing the document exchange processes taking place between the ESA partners. This role is especially important when we know that these partners need to collaborate on specific projects, while remaining in every other respect competitors outside of any ESA context.

EDIDOC shall be put into operation and experimental use with the cooperation of pilot users (including some of the major European space industries) who are expected to receive comprehensive support as part of the project, in both technical and organizational areas.

Specific SGML and EDIFACT substandards will be defined and implemented, covering both technical and administrative applications, and will be submitted to international standardisation bodies. They will include a.o. the following document types:

• project control documents such as Monthly Progress Report, Engineering Change Notice, and Contract Change Notice.
• software documents that are part of the ESA Software Engineering Standards such as User Requirements, Architectural Design, Operator Manual, etc.
• and possibly ITT and Proposal.

In the medium term, the use of EDIDOC is scheduled to become compulsory for all contractual exchanges. To provide the EDIDOC users with maximal legal reliability, a contractual framework and a set of organization rules (model agreements) will be implemented.

The project has been contracted to BIM Belgium, who will realize the development of the software and perform the on-site integration and tests within a period of 26 months.

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latest update: August 8, 1996
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