Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

The framework that is presented in this paper models the main features of an application for documentation systems. The main entities involved in the process are identified and abstracted in a software framework.

The system as it is shown in the case study is capable of generating a fully functional Virtual Document. It allows dynamic updating of the data and offers a rich set of utilities such as the dynamic linking, personalised output based on the XML data, dictionary support, etc. The application can be executed as it is or extended to provide solutions customised to more specific needs of documentation systems.

In the left frame, the menu that was prepared by the components is presented. In the case that the links are followed a coded request towards the information components of the web application will be generated. In the middle frame the report developed by the currently addressed component is illustrated. The first part of the report is a dynamically generated natural language section describing the structural positioning of the component. The next part is a textual description of the entity represented by the component that has been preprocessed by the text processor and hyperlinks have been added. Next to the link there is the star (*) link that produces the results in the right frame. Then a graphic is presented and finally a selection from the contents of a XML file is included that is based on the processing of the corresponding “user model” and “set of rules” entities. In the right frame, lexically related items and links to dictionary definitions are created according to the text processor results.

In the next Screenshot the Entrance State of the web application is shown. The user model updating form and the login screen are included in the other windows. This application implements a documentation system with a structural menu based on the product structure, customised reports on all assemblies, subassemblies , parts, and equipped with navigational aids for the documentation user. 

The system architecture can be viewed as a combination of the five distinct subsystems identified earlier. The User Management contains the Login handler and the User Model components. The Login Handler identifies the user according to his username and password. Then the User Model object, according to the username, finds and retrieves the previously set values of the user model for the specific user. The Document Component integrates different behaviours according to a set of interfaces. The primary behavior is this of the component. The second main behaviour of the component is that of a placeholder for data. The Report Interface generates reports of the data contained by the component in the form of HTML Documents. The Rule Engine component is an abstraction that supports simple IF THEN rules and acts as a wrapper to a proper rule based engine if needed. The PDM Integration component, consists of three parts, the PDM Monitor which is the main controller class, the check for updates, which uses a timer and probes the files to check for updates, and the node objects that act as an intermediate placeholder for the data. The Text Processing subsystem includes the Text Processor and the Product Dictionary. The Product Dictionary keeps a record of all the component names instantiated. The Web Integration module comprises of a set of Servlets that feed the output of the components reporting interface to the web. The Servlets also handle the requests received by parsing the parameters and feeding them to the root component.