PRODUCT DOCUMENTATION CREATION AND MANAGEMENT USING STEP

Información del proyecto

DOCSTEP

Identificador del acuerdo de subvención: LE34225

Fecha de inicio

Fecha de finalización

Financiado con arreglo a

• Specific programme of research and technological development and demonstration in the area of telematic applications of common interest, 1994-1998

Coste total

Sin datos

Aportación de la UE

Sin datos

Coordinado por

Airbus Industrie
France

Objetivo

DOCSTEP aims to develop a document authoring system to provide high-quality product documentation overcoming language barriers. Manufacturing industries working on a global scale identify this as an increasingly important factor in product differentiation. Documentation volumes are large, and controlling consistency across such documentation, often developed in different places by people with differing sets of language and product skills and knowledge, is a real challenge. The DOCSTEP approach takes up trends in product data management as a whole and applies them to technical documentation management as a special case. It will provide the means to overcome language barriers and preserve accuracy and consistency. The focus for the project will be the provision of an open authoring platforms, based on a common approach and the same basic technologies, for producing customer documentation in the aerospace and paper machinery industrial sectors.

Efficient and effective document management is a critical success factor for organisations which produce very large volumes of documentation. One of the industrial partners in this project produces nearly 100 million pages a year. Both industrial partners have products with long product life cycles, and which require a high degree of customisation.
Documentation services are being seen more and more as a potential factor in product differentiation in areas where technical leadership is difficult to maintain. However organisations still need to focus on their core competencies and to look for ways of reducing the cost of providing documentation by using the appropriate technology.
Sheer volume is not the only problem these organisations face. In their particular environments, authors may not necessarily share the same platform which results in inconsistencies of terminology and style, and a mix of data representation and storage formats. Authors are not necessarily native speakers of the language in which the documentation is being written.
To write effective documentation, authors obviously need to really know and understand the product or component they are describing. This knowledge is not always easy to acquire, particularly in cases where outsourcing is used.
Documentation drives business processes. Itgains context and takes on new uses from multiple contributors and connections to other documents, which increases complexity. Although this makes documentation difficult to control, it is vital to ensure the quality and consistency of information, and is an important marketing asset. As more and more revenues come from international sales, documentation is required in languages which are not native to the authors.
All of this is a real challenge which DOCSTEP will respond to by bridging gaps between documents and their content. It will develop an authoring system where documents are based on the generic model of the product, and integrated language technology tools will allow the end user to access documents via text elements, conceptual networks and graphics. The use of industry standards will avoid adding to the current plethora of tools that do not offer an integrated solution.
The DOCSTEP solution will overcome the large amount of effort currently spent re- writing and re-translating documents, and following complex validation circuits and checking terminology. The high costs of producing and maintaining large volumes of technical documentation will therefore be reduced.
It integrates the following tools and technologies, centred on the production of documentation in collaborative environments monitored by workflow management systems:
Natural Language tools: these provide word processing including spelling, grammar and style checkers, dictionary and terminology management, computational lexicons, and translation aids.
Document Management: a growing number of companies offer SGML systems which modify documents for publication or electronic delivery, control their structure and transfer them. However this is still in its infancy regarding product documentation which could be solved by linking the SGML and STEP worlds. In other words, to bridge the gap between a product and its documentation.
STEP: a standard format to exchange engineering information developed to cover product representation and data exchange.
Other aims of the system are to provide:
- A language independent semantic layer available to natural language modules such as a language checker and a translation engine.
- Integrated functions which allow the end user to navigate using text elements, conceptual networks and graphics.
- An architecture that allows information to be shared, distributed over different platforms and locations, and used with new and legacy formats.
- Support for multi-authored and multi-lingual documentation.
DOCSTEP is based on a preparatory phase project which designed a powerful solution using a friendly authoring system integrating four complementary technologies:
- The STEP standard as the framework for the semantic representation of the contents of the document.
- Terminology technology as the pivot between the words appearing in the documents and the concepts expressed in the STEP model of the product.
- Controlled language as a key Natural Language application using data from the previous two technologies to check the morphology and syntax of the text, as well as the semantics.
- Workflow and Configuration management addressing factors affecting the production of the documentation as a whole such as corporate structure, production schedules and responsibilities.
The expected benefits of the system are:
- better control of the quality and reliability of information in documents
- reduced costs of document production and maintenance
- faster document production lead times
- better features and functions to support multi-linguality.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

• ciencias médicas y de la salud › ciencias de la salud › enfermedad infecciosa › virus de ARN › VIH
• ciencias naturales › informática y ciencias de la información › ciencia de datos › intercambio de datos

Programa(s)

• FP4-TELEMATICS 2C - Specific programme of research and technological development and demonstration in the area of telematic applications of common interest, 1994-1998

Tema(s)

• D.12 - Language Engineering

Convocatoria de propuestas

Datos no disponibles

Régimen de financiación

Datos no disponibles

Coordinador

Airbus Industrie

• Aportación de la UE: Sin datos
• Dirección: 1 Rond Point Maurice Bellonte ; 31707 Blagnac ; Francia
• Coste total: Sin datos

Participantes (1)

Valmet

Finlandia

• Aportación de la UE: Sin datos
• Dirección: Espoo
• Coste total: Sin datos