Team accessible methods for production of safety critical hypermedia documentation

Abstract

This paper describes ongoing work to apply software engineering methods to the production of hypermedia technical documentation for safety critical application areas. Technical documentation is an increasingly important application area for hypermedia. In industries such as aerospace the economic drivers for widespread adoption of online hypermedia are very strong. One of the major issues in hypermedia design in these applications areas is the lack of rigorous design methods which would allow guarantees of correctness to be made. Current work on 'industrial strength' hypermedia has tended to concentrate on issues of system robustness or database query techniques. This work is directed at document systems which are designed as a coherent whole, to provide means of specifying and validating such documents by application of formal methods, allowing mathematical proofs to be made. These methods, in themselves, are not adequate, since they are accessible only to software engineers. A usable method must be accessible to document designers and software engineers. A 'formal storyboard' notation has been devised which has proven to be usable by those trained in hypermedia design and translates directly into the process algebra CCS (Calculus of Communicating Systems). The method has the potential to address at least one of the major problems impeding the use of hypermedia in technical documentation supporting safety critical industries.