Semantic-Based Authoring of Technical Documentation

Authoring of technical documentation is a knowledge-intensive activity that requires knowledge of various domains and information from several product life-cycle phases. This paper presents two complementary semantic-based methods for creating product support documentation and delivering it to the user. The first approach is based on using concurrent engineering and product data management (PDM) technology. The second approach uses ontologies to capture the semantic complexity of the product support domain. Promising direction for further research is the integration of these two approaches.