Automatic generation of documentation for information systems

Abstract

Documentation plays a central role in Information Systems (IS) development and use. Soltware tools must be built to allow its automatic generation. In the same way as the need of prototyping for IS construction is generally accepted, so must be the need for "Documentation Prototyping". In this paper a paradigm for the generation of documentation is proposed. It can be adapted to any IS development approach. In order to illustrate the proposed ideas, the Infolog approach was chosen in this paper.On-line documentation is, in most cases, preferable to off-line one (the traditional paper manuals). The paradigm for generation of documentation herein proposed can be used to obtain both on-line and off-line documentation. Moreover, it is obtained in hypertext form for better browsing. The linearization of the hypertext network is also possible in order to produce the ot~en required linear form (for example to obtain paper manuals).The main contributions of this work are the generation paradigm, which uses the semantics of the modelling primitives in order to obtain natural language text fragments describing the specified models, and the generation of the "User Manual", the more eritieal of the documents to be produeed.

Testing and test-driven development of conceptual schemas

“…There also exist approaches to generate abstracts of model specifications (such as documentation in natural language, user manuals, etc.) (Jesus et al 1992).…”

“…As we have seen in the state of the art on conceptual schema validation presented in Section 2.2, several existing techniques are used to achieve correct and complete conceptual schemas in different degrees. These include paraphrasing in natural language (Rolland et al 1992, Dalianis 1992, Métais 2002, Frederiks et al 2006, generation of abstractions and abstracts (Jesus et al 1992), explanation generation (Gulla et al 1993, Olivé et al 1996, Gulla 1996, constraint acquisition (Hartmann et al 2009) or simulation and animation (Van Lamsweerde 2009, Lindland et al 1994, Dignum et al 1987, Gogolla et al 1995, Gogolla et al 2007.…”