Metadata and Content Management Bridging Technical Documentation and Automation Technology

¹ Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Information Management and Media, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
² SKAN AG, Technical Editorial Department, 4123 Allschwil, Switzerland

Abstract

The use of taxonomic metadata in technical communication is not only transforming more and more to multi-hierarchical ontologies but also gaining attraction and new use cases beyond technical authoring. In the field of technical documentation, by classifying text modules product documentations can be generated automatically. This approach can also be applied to other documents containing classified objects, which should be merged according to certain specifications and requirements. Based on the way of working in content management systems (CMS), in this paper, a use case from pharmaceutical machinery industry (provided by SKAN AG) is shown in which the creation of a plant-specific alarm matrix should be implemented in a partially automated way.

Depending on the complexity of the plant, usually, the process to build an alarm matrix for a project takes an automation engineer approximately two weeks and shows non-standardized manual steps and elements, that make the process complex. By developing comprehensive standards of alarm matrices, the inheritance of properties to newly created matrices should be possible with the help of metadata in order to reduce the initial creation effort. For this purpose, individual components of the alarm matrix are to be managed as objects for the variant management and component identifications are to be automated through the machine processing of the planning documents. By working out the relations between individual documents, elements, and components, the necessary basis was to be created for making the underlying logic machine-interpretable.