Figure 2. Product Models & Product Structures
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Configuration control for publications pertains to the facilities for tracking changes introduced through the processes involved with the authoring, editing, and publishing information; the approval and release processes for such information types; as well as the organizations and persons involved in creation and management of authoring, editing, and publishing information. Although the documentation environment uses terms such as authoring, editing, publishing etc.—the processes are analogous to design, creation, analysis, and production of any product data. Thus the aspiration to apply configuration control to these processes is a natural management goal.
As noted in the The Problem Domain above, SGML provides a way of structuring complex text information associated with products. On the other hand, STEP provides mechanisms for configuration and management of products.
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In order to integrate these two technologies it is necessary to address product documentation as representations of SGML declarations and instances in respect to STEP product definitions. |
In the context of this work, SGML-encoded instances of product documentation (conventional: documents) are produced through the process of authoring. The preparation of manuscripts and the organization of information into publications is through the process of editing(2). It is conceivable that these processes could be placed under configuration management facilities running within the STEP environment.
Publications are converted into perceptually understandable information, such as printed paper or screen views, through formatting and layout and then prepared for dissemination through the process of publishing. It is not seen that the dissemination and distribution processes need to be controlled in the same manner as authoring and editing and therefore is free to be performed in other environments.
At the same time that there is an increasing need to control and support the total life cycle of vital documentation about products, there is also an increasing requirement for more rational and effective use (and particularly re-use) of the product documentation.
One of the merits of STEP is the ability to provide standard information models (in EXPRESS (3)) which represent product definitions and product definition structures. Essential material aspects as well as the functional aspects need to be and can be represented in the models of application protocols as well as their relationships into assemblies, connections, etc. The structures may be discipline specific. For example, a designer's view of a bill of material structure may be essentially different from the manufacturer's view of the same information.
Figure 2.
Product Models & Product Structures
Figure 2. Product Models & Product Structures illustrates a typical product model together with the hierarchically structured instantiations. In the representation of a product structure, as shown in the circles, each rectangular box represents an instance of a product definition; the links between the rectangular boxes illustrate instances of product definition relationships.
In order to have a complete view for collecting information and authoring product documentation, there may need to be more than one product structure in an information model.(4) It actually may involve many hierarchical structures of different types in order to provide a complete context for authoring. Furthermore, the product definition relationship may be classified, which again may lead to multiple concurrent hierarchical structures.
Studies(5) show that technical documentation can be de-composed into well-defined and bounded sets of information objects. An information object represents one idea, concept, or relates to one main point of the product, function, or process that is being described. An information object is a locution (set of words, phrases, sentences, etc.) that has the product model, or some explicit part of the model, as its context(6).
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The information object is a locution of product documentation describing one idea. |
Information objects may often have some inherent grammatical structure, such as paragraphs, lists, or tables. For example, a procedure is a typical type or class of information object where the content is contained in a sequence of steps to be performed and will usually be represented as a numbered list.
Information objects may be represented by an instance of an SGML_STRING (see later) created by an author, or may be generated from another representation of a product, such as from a representation in a database.
Grouping information into information objects allows an intuitive and flexible structuring of information. It also allows the re-use of information as the information objects can occur in several concurrent structures, for example, the same information objects could occur in a weekly maintenance manual as well as in the daily job sheets. Information objects can be assigned addresses and thereby be referred to (linked to) from multiple representations of models.
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The use of information objects for product documentation information provides the ability to model product documentation within the product data environment. |
(2) We have chosen to use the process of editing to mean the organization and structuring of publications. This may be in contrast to a common use of the term publishing for this concept, however, we felt that publishing was not the proper term to use as its connotation is too close to dissemination. As used here, editing does not refer to copyediting which is the completion of a manuscript for typesetting. (ref. The Chicago Manual of Style §2.1)
(3) EXPRESS is the standard (ISO 10303-11) modelling language for STEP.
(4) The above model may be a template that can be applied to model the functional features of a product in the same manner as it can be used to model material aspects.