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

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.