| "Hypertext Engineering": Practical Methods for Creating a Compact Disc Encyclopedia | | BIB | 11-19 | |
| Robert J. Glushko; Mark D. Weaver; Thomas A. Coonan; Janet E. Lincoln | |||
| The LaserROM Project: A Case Study in Document Processing Systems | | BIB | 21-29 | |
| Mike Rafeld | |||
| Auto-Updating as a Technical Documentation Tool | | BIBAK | 31-36 | |
| George Towner | |||
| Experimental software tools are described for implementing auto-updating, a
method of transporting information between a document and multiple databases.
Such information may include technical data, formatting markups, graphics, and
text strings. These tools support insertion of database fields into a document
by familiar copying operations; at any later time, they can then import current
field values into the document. One benefit of auto-updating is that different
authors can work efficiently on selected subject areas of one or more documents
by reviewing and editing the database information. Other benefits for document
preparation and publication are discussed. Keywords: Auto-updating, Live copying, CADoc, Publication systems, Authoring system,
Computer-aided documentation | |||
| Conceptual Documents: A Mechanism for Specifying Active Views in Hypertext | | BIBA | 37-42 | |
| J. Nanard; M. Nanard; H. Richy | |||
| Browsing is the classical way of accessing subsets of hypertexts. In this paper we introduce the notion of "conceptual document" to describe how to synthesize as a structured document any specific view of a set of data related by semantic links. A conceptual document is a description specifying all the aspects of this view including not only the logical structure and the presentation rules but also the extraction rules which express at a semantic level how to obtain the content of the view. It shortens the access paths to information and allows the user to group together chunks of information. The example of the X-station project illustrates the use of this concept as a uniform mechanism for viewing, managing and manipulating information. | |||
| Adding Browsing Semantics to the Hypertext Model | | BIBAK | 43-50 | |
| P. David Stotts; Richard Furuta | |||
| We present a new model of hypertext that represents both the relationships
that tie individual pieces of information together into the hypertext (i.e.,
the adjacencies) and also the browsing semantics to be associated with the
hypertext (i.e., the manner in which the information is to be visited). The
model is based on Petri nets, and is a generalization of existing directed
graph based models. Consequently, the model permits development of browsing
and authoring systems that can benefit from the analytical techniques that have
been developed for Petri nets and also from the user interface designs that
have been developed for hypertext systems. The Petri net base also permits
more powerful specification of what is to be displayed when the hypertext is
browsed. These include the ability to synchronize simultaneous traversals of
separate paths through the hypertext and the ability to incorporate security
considerations into the hypertext, specifying nodes that can be proven to be
accessible only to certain classes of browsers. The paper includes a practical
example demonstrating these specification techniques. Keywords: Hypertext, Petri nets, Browsing semantics, Synchronization, Security | |||
| Evolution of an SGML Application Generator | | BIBA | 51-60 | |
| Lynne A. Price; Joe Schneider | |||
| The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is a notation for describing classes of structured documents and for coding documents belonging to described classes. An advantage of SGML and other grammar-based document representations is the ability to perform multiple applications on a single document source file. This paper describes the evolution of a software development tool for implementing such applications. It explains the original design as well as enhancements made during the system's first eighteen months. Although not statistically significant, data on the use of the enhanced features are presented. The experience described is relevant to other software engineering tools for text processing. | |||
| Translating among Processable Multi-Media Document Formats Using ODA | | BIB | 61-70 | |
| Jonathan Rosenberg; Mark S. Sherman; Ann Marks; Frank Giuffrida | |||
| Difficulties in Parsing SGML | | BIBA | 71-77 | |
| Jim Heath; Larry Welsch | |||
| A frequently cited problem with the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is that applications using the standard have been slow in arriving. Part of this delay is because of the instability of the standard and part because of constructs of the language that are functionally redundant and/or add unnecessary complexity to both machine and human processing. This paper is based on our experience implementing an SGML parser using commonly available tools for building programming language translators. It describes the problems we encountered and suggests modifications to SGML to eliminate those problems. The modified language can be implemented using well tested tools and will be more stable and more amenable to both computer and human processing while maintaining all of the fundamental strengths of SGML. | |||
| A Window and Icon Based Prototype for Expert Assistance for Manipulation of SGML Document Type Definitions | | BIBA | 79-84 | |
| W. Timothy Polk; Lawrence E., III Bassham | |||
| The DTD editing tool is a window and icon based tool for creation, manipulation and comprehension of SGML Document Type Definitions (DTDs). This tool allows users to manipulate SGML DTDs without any knowledge of the rather complex SGML syntax. More generally, the tool allows users to manipulate context-free grammars without any knowledge of the syntax used to describe them. The tool generates SGML DTDs, and has features specific to that application; however the approach could also be applied to the manipulation of context-free grammars represented in other grammar description languages. | |||
| Interactive Effectivity Control: Design and Applications | | BIB | 85-91 | |
| Richard Ilson | |||
| Incremental Document Formatting | | BIB | 93-100 | |
| Pehong Chen; Michael A. Harrison; Ikuo Minakata | |||
| An Adaptation of Dataflow Methods for WYSIWYG Document Processing | | BIB | 101-109 | |
| Donald D. Chamberlin | |||
| Why Switch from Paper to Electronic Manuals? | | BIBA | 111-116 | |
| Cheryl A. Ventura | |||
| This article contributes to the general discussion about the rationale for
switching to electronic forms of documentation. It describes one particular
domain: military maintenance documentation.
Part of the problem with military documentation is: the problems with paper form manuals are vaguely described and ill-defined. The problems must be better understood before we can understand how electronic form manuals can solve them. This article presents a view of these problems as an organized system with clear cause-effect relationships between problems. It then discusses how specific electronic technologies can be applied to solve the system of problems as a whole. | |||
| The Role of Modularity in Document Authoring Systems | | BIBA | 117-124 | |
| Janet H. Walker | |||
| Modularity is a fundamental concept in documents and document development as well as in programming. I hypothesized that the effectiveness of writing professionals could be increased by providing a working environment to support explicit modularity in documents and document development. This paper briefly describes an environment designed to enable testing this hypothesis and evaluates it by means of discussions with professional writers who used it for large, real-world, development projects. | |||
| The Design of a Document Database | | BIBA | 125-134 | |
| Chris Clifton; Hector Garcia-Molina; Robert Hagmann | |||
| In this paper a Document Base Management System is proposed that incorporates conventional database and hypertext ideas into a document database. The Document Base operates as a server, users access the database through different application programs. The query language which applications use to retrieve documents is described. | |||
| Automatic Text Indexing Using Complex Identifiers | | BIBA | 135-144 | |
| Gerard Salton | |||
| Automatic text analysis methods are available that can assign identifying elements, or terms, to written documents, based on statistical and other formal criteria. Attempts to refine the established single-term indexing methods by using more complex syntactic and/or semantic methods have been unsuccessful. The problems relating to the identification and use of complex content identifiers are examined, and the available syntactic indexing methodologies are evaluated. | |||
| Formalizing the Figural: Aspects of a Foundation for Document Manipulation | | BIB | 145-151 | |
| David M. Levy; Daniel C. Brotsky; Kenneth R. Olson | |||
| A Library for Incremental Update of Bitmap Images | | BIBA | 153-158 | |
| David Dobkin; Eleftherios Koutsofios; Rob Pike | |||
| To achieve the maximum performance from bitmap displays, the screen must be
used not just as an output device, but as a data structure that may cache
computed images. In an interactive text or picture editor, that may mean
converting the internal representation of what's being edited into a set of
rectangles that tile the screen. Incremental updates of the image may then be
done by rearranging some subset of the tiling using bitmap operations,
independently of how the tiling was derived.
We have taken the ideas used in the screen update algorithms for the sam text editor and generalized them so they may be applied to more structured documents than the simple character stream sam edits. The ideas have been tested by building a library and a simple interactive document editor that treat a document as a hierarchical structure that may include text, pictures, and variable spacing. The core of the library is operators to make incremental changes to the display while maintaining the hierarchical data structure that describes it. | |||
| The Escher Document Imaging Model | | BIB | 159-168 | |
| S. N. Zilles; P. Lucas; T. M. Linden; J. B. Lotspiech; A. R. Harbury | |||
| Two Complementary Techniques for Digitized Document Analysis | | BIBA | 169-176 | |
| George Nagy; Junichi Kanai; Mukkai Krishnamoorthy; Mathews Thomas; Mahesh Viswanathan | |||
| Two complementary methods are proposed for characterizing the spatial structure of digitized technical documents and labelling various logical components without using optical character recognition. The top-down method segments and labels the page image simultaneously using publication-specific information in the form of a page-grammar. The bottom-up method naively segments the document into rectangles that contain individual connected components, combines blocks using knowledge about generic layout objects, and identifies logical objects using publication-specific knowledge. Both methods are based on the X-Y tree representation of a page image. The procedures are demonstrated on scanned and synthesized bit-maps of the title pages of technical articles. | |||
| Tracking Text in Mixed-Mode Documents | | BIBA | 177-185 | |
| J. Patrick Bixler | |||
| This paper describes a method for extracting arbitrarily oriented text in documents containing both text and graphics. The technique presented is inspired by the tracking algorithms frequently found in raster to vector conversion systems. By identifying text components in the document, reducing the resolution of the image by the size of the characters, and then tracking the centers of the character components, all text strings can be removed and subsequently reoriented to the horizontal. They can then be presented for automated character recognition. A by-product of the method is that characters are automatically grouped together to form words and phrases. We give a detailed description of the algorithm, discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and present some sample results obtained from a typical city street map, a land survey map, and a business form. | |||
| Topics in Document Research | | BIB | 187-193 | |
| David M. Levy | |||