The Warship Support Agency of the Ministry of Defence
Docking a warship is an expensive business and there are an ever growing number of Underwater Engineering techniques to carry out maintenance or effect repairs on ships and submarines while they are still afloat. Our client required a single 'Knowledge Base' of these techniques to be available on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Intranet. This knowledge base would be continuously evolving, so a management interface was required for data to be added and updated.
The information had to be easy to find for
a particular piece of equipment fitted to a class of ship and, once found,
should provide automatic links to other information on the MoD Intranet.
A detailed report on any particular technique had to be available in both
printed and electronic form for transmission to ships or ports overseas.
Lastly, the Knowledge Base had to be 'exportable' so that commercial organisations
involved in designing new ships could have access to the data.
We designed an SQL Server™ database that interfaced with two Active Server
Pages™ (ASP) web applications to display and manage the knowledge base. Navigation
was provided with a simple tree structure so that users could drill down from
type of ship through a hierarchy of equipment to individual techniques (Type
42 Destroyer - Propulsion - Propeller - Replace Blade by Diver). To maintain
this structure, we designed an ActiveX™ control that was embedded in
the management web page.
Reports were produced using Crystal Reports™ web
components and these could be exported in PDF or Word™ format. To provide
an exportable version, we produced a script that would export the database
to Access™ and would
interface with the display ASP application. This could then be provided to
third parties on a CD ROM.