S1000D is an international specification for the production and management of technical publications. The specification is based on XML and is primarily used for representing information for operating and maintaining air, land and sea systems (military and commercial). Over the past two years, an OSD-sponsored Reduction of Total Ownership Cost (RTOC) program managed by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) has defined a standards-based approach for bridging the technical data and the learning communities. Known as the S1000D Transformation Toolkit, it leverages S1000D to improve learning content lifecycle management for the DoD. One component of the Bridge Project is the transformation of S1000D learning content into Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) conforming content packages.

This transformation has taken the form of an open-source toolkit available on Source Forge. The significance of this shift is that the management of learning data is refocused from SCORM content packages to authoritative information modules managed within a common source database (CSDB). The CSDB contains all technical information that supports an air, land or sea project. The open-source toolkit can therefore transform both technical information and original learning content from S1000D to SCORM. This significant development creates a clear distinction between SCORM content as an output format and authoritative source information in XML-based structured markup.

This paper discusses the open-source toolkit's architecture and functionality. The paper finishes with a discussion of the lessons learned from the project, the future direction of the toolkit and possible impacts on distributed learning.