Integrated Management of Technical Documentation

Writing documentation is an integral part of any technical development. Thisactivity must be supported by adequate tools. The ESPRIT II project 2001SPRITE (Storage, Processing and Retrieval of Information in a Technical Environment) developed a prototype of an integrated system for production and maintenance of technical documentation. SPRITE provides authors and managers with an information management system supporting direct access to the complete information environment, ranging from documents stored in the internal database, over paper-based information (such as drawings and reports), to electronic CAD files and external databases. This book summarizes important aspects of a system for technical documentation: document architecture, organization of the document space, versioning, multiauthoring, scanning and recognition of paper documents, and integration of data stored on external media. For each of these aspects, solutions developed in the SPRITE project are presented at both conceptual and technical levels.