A Multimedia Authoring-in-the-Large Environment to Support Complex Product Documentation

  • Authors:

  • Liang H. Hsu;Peiya Liu;Tim Dawidowsky

  • Affiliations:

  • Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey. Email: lhsu@scr.siemens.com;Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey;Siemens Energieerzeugung KWU, Muelheim, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a new paradigm for multimedia document authoring tosupport large-scaled industrial technical documentation. Anindustrial-strength multimedia authoring environment requires a high degreeof automation support for producing a large amount of high-quality technicaldocumentation efficiently and effectively, and provides a consistent userinterface to facilitate viewing and browsing of large-scaled technicalcontents. Product documentation includes technical information in all mediafor all aspects of a product during the life cycle of the product. Productdocuments are highly cross-referenced and often shared by a family ofrelated product models. Previous authoring paradigms have their limitationsin supporting such complex technical documentation required for today‘ssophisticated products. Our approach is based on an authoring-in-the-largeparadigm by adopting formal configuration specifications for automatically assembling machine-specific product manuals from component documents, andformal hyperlink specifications for systematically creating hyperlinks inhighly cross-referenced technical documents. Integrated media-specificviewers are provided to support viewing, browsing and navigation oflarge-scaled hyperlinked multimedia contents in a consistent manner forvarious product-related applications such as operation, maintenance andtraining on various platforms such as UNIX, PC/Windows, laptops andhand-held devices locally and over network.