Integrated Management of Technical Documentation: The System Sprite

ISBN-13: 9783540558804 / Angielski / Miękka / 1992 / 244 str.

Jirka Hoppe

Opis

Writing documentation is an integral part of any technical product development. A significant amount of time is spent describing the product functionality, giving insights into technical details, providing maintenance instructions, specifying marketing information, writing user manuals, etc. As the creation of such documentation is generally a source of higher production costs, many large companies are realising the need to increase the efficiency of documentation handling. Simple documents consisting of only a few pages can be developed on simple systems. Basic components of such systems are an editor handling text and graphics, file storage, and a printer. Such configurations, however, are not sufficient to handle professional documentation as produced by larger companies. Detailed studies of technical documentation requirements have revealed that in particular the following functionality is not usually provided by such simple documentation systems: Technical documentation is often very large; documents having hundreds or even thousands of pages are not exceptional. Due to size and complexity, technical documentation is developed most often by a team of authors. A system for technical documentation has to provide functionality supporting the organisation of a group of authors. Technical documentation usually consists of many different documents combined into one large documentation for a particular product. The optimum organisation of the storage and retrieval of documents is crucial for the performance and acceptability of the system. The functionality offered by normal file systems is not adequate to organise complex systems.

Spis treści

I. Introduction.- 1. Requirements.- 2. Overview of the System.- II. Functionality.- 3. Storage, Retrieval and Management of Documents.- 4. Document Processing.- 5. Acquisition.- III. Architectures.- 6. System Architecture.- 7. Architecture of a Multimedia Document Database.- IV. Database Aspects.- 8. Versioning of Technical Documents — Design and Implementation.- 9. Multiauthoring Aspects.- 10. Extensibility in Object-Oriented Database Systems.- 11. An Object-Oriented Active Data Dictionary to Support Database Evolution.- 12. Storage Server.- V. Application Aspects.- 13. Layout and Logical Structure Recognition.- 14. Scanning, Vectorization and Postprocessing.- 15. Knowledge-based Drawing Interpretation.- 16. The RDB Extraction Application.- VI. Conclusions.- 17. Results.- Acknowledgements.

O autorze

The book summarizes important aspects of a system for technical documentation. Solutions developed in the ESPRIT project SPRITE are presented at both conceptual and technical levels.