Documentation Reuse: Managing Similar Documents

Abstract

Many engineering and business domains involve management of similar, but also different documents. Examples are user guides and other manuals for different versions of a product, contracts between vendors and clients, and legal documents. The usual practice is to capture similarities in templates that must be copied and manually customized to a new context – often a slow, tedious, and error-prone process. Our Document Management Environment (DME) exploits similarities among documents to simplify and automate routine tasks involved in creating and updating documents. Built as MS Word add-in, DME can represent any group of recurring fragments as a template that is reused (after adaptations) to create custom document. DME concept is based on proven method for adaptive reuse of software.