TITLE: IDDS: An Interactive Decentralized Documentation System

AUTHORS(s) & AFFILIATION(s): Christoph Meinel, University of Trier, Germany; Harald Sack, University of Trier, Germany; and Volker Schillings, University of Trier, Germany

KEYWORD(s): documentation system, authoring, multimedia documentation, distributed documentation processing

PRESENTER / CONTACT PERSON: Harald Sack

CONTACT EMAIL: sack@uni-trier.de

ABSTRACT:

The paper describes the design and the application of an Interactive Decentralized Documentation System (IDDS). IDDS is a web-based, interactive documentation system that is especially designed for the support of working groups distributed over many places. It enables the creation of "just-in-time"-documentation and provides authoring tools for multimedia documents supporting multiple authors per document including a versioning system. IDDS provides an HTML-frontend for being accessible anywhere with a standard web-browser for creating, reading, or commenting on the provided documentation. The workflow of IDDS includes an interactive and guided reviewing process of the documentation including security mechanisms that are designed to maintain a high  quality of the created documentation. Furthermore, first experiences of the application of IDDS in a system and network-administration environment are given.

Last modified October 28, 2001 by Scott Tilley.