Defining Genres and Their Features for Studying Information Reuse: Preliminary Findings

This paper discusses the use of genre theory for analysing information content of structured documents and mixed media training material. We describe an analysis phase of an ongoing research aimed at information reuse from Operation and Maintenance (O&M) manuals in training, consisting of spoken, multimedia and textual content. The content of training was given the form of templates. We used them successfully for locating reusable information contents available from O&M manuals and other information sources. These templates can also serve as a basis for designing XML document type definitions (DTD’s) for training content, or as draft versions of XSLT templates for defining reuse transformations from source to target documentation. While defining and hardening genres of training, we collected metainformation and knowledge the trainers possessed. We then formalised this as another set of genres for training. Based on our findings we suggest that genre theory can be used as 1) a framework for defining content within genres, 2) for revealing metainformation needed for enacting genres and 3) for locating reusable information contents from structured source documents. We also observed potential problems for reuse in scheduling of production processes and a need for demonstrating a single point of access to all training knowledge and material available.