From Natural Language Documents to Sharable Product Knowledge

A great part of a company's product knowledge is often only available as natural language documents. The disadvantages of this source of information are its informal structure, the lack of actuality and general interdepartmental accessibility. We propose a way to integrate knowledge about a speciic product contained in technical documentation into corporate memory. By analysing e.g. maintenance manuals and representing their content in a language independent way this knowledge can be made accessible to the whole company for diierent kinds of usages. The most important usage of this knowledge is the automatic generation of consistent multilingual texts. This knowledge can considerably enrich the modelling of a product in corporate memory and is a step towards the continuous documentation of the whole product life cycle. Finally, we outline an au-thoring tool which supports the continuous maintenance and evolution of the knowledge base as well as the interactive construction and modiication of documents.