Information transformations for Web based documentation

This paper presents two pieces of work which together form part of a chain of information transformation leading from engineering design models to useable hypermedia technical documentation. The building of such a chain needs to take account of two major constraints, those of efficiency of the transformation process and that of usability of the end result. The first piece of work presented here addresses the first problem by providing a means of automatically simplifying a model to a stage where it is usable as an interactive VRML document. The second piece of work addresses the second issue by investigating and prototyping novel means of presentation which provide greater 'readability' for the resultant models.