ALIVE: A Distributed Live-Link Documentation System

This paper presents the ALIVE project, which has been developed at Italtel to provide the means for automatic management of technical documentation. The main goal of ALIVE is to enable the user of a technical publishing system to establish live-links with data stored on remote databases. Live-links allow for automatic update of a document with database contents: whenever a modification occurs in the database data referenced from the document text, the document is updated accordingly. The ALIVE user interface has been implemented by exploiting the functionality offered by the Interleaf1 technical publishing environment, providing the user with a fully integrated environment. It allows the user to browse through a description of the available databases and to formulate queries related to data stored in them by means of a menu-based interface. By enriching technical publishing features with data consistency controls in a uniform way, ALIVE moves towards the integrated desktop concept.