Abstract
In this paper, we present a new paradigm for multimedia document authoring to support large-scaled industrial technical documentation. An industrial-strength multimedia authoring environment requires a high degree of automation support for producing a large amount of high-quality technical documentation efficiently and effectively, and provides a consistent user interface to facilitate viewing and browsing of large-scaled technical contents. Product documentation includes technical information in all media for all aspects of a product during the life cycle of the product. Product documents are highly cross-referenced and often shared by a family of related product models. Previous authoring paradigms have their limitations in supporting such complex technical documentation required for today's sophisticated products. Our approach is based on an authoring-in-the-large paradigm by adopting formal configuration specifications for automatically assembling machine-specific product manuals from component documents, and formal hyperlink specifications for systematically creating hyperlinks in highly cross-referenced technical documents. Integrated media-specific viewers are provided to support viewing, browsing and navigation of large-scaled hyperlinked multimedia contents in a consistent manner for various product-related applications such as operation, maintenance and training on various platforms such as UNIX, PC/Windows, laptops and hand-held devices locally and over network.
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Hsu, L.H., Liu, P. & Dawidowsky, T. A Multimedia Authoring-in-the-Large Environment to Support Complex Product Documentation. Multimedia Tools and Applications 8, 11–64 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009643213925
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009643213925
- authoring-in-the-large
- SGML conversion
- component document
- document database
- product manual composition
- product manual configuration specification
- document evaluation
- document transformation
- incremental composition
- AIU extraction
- AIU structure specification
- automatic hyperlinking
- hyperlink specification
- incremental hyperlinking
- hyperlink management
- large-scaled document browsing
- hyperlink browser
- multimedia document annotator
- multimedia document mailer
- card-based document browsing
- form-based document browsing
- network-based document delivery