Modelling of Product Knowledge in the Framework of Multilingual Technical Documentation

Multilingual technical documentation is increasingly important due to the rising complexity of technical products. Our main point in this paper is the fact that it is possible to model product knowledge in such a way that this representation, together with additional linguistic resources, can be used for the knowledge based generation of multilingual technical documentation. The advantages of this approach are availability, timeliness and consistency between the state of the product and its documentation in multiple languages. For the diierent text types in technical documents, diierent kinds of knowledge are necessary. Parts of the product knowledge can be obtained by reusing data which have already been gained by the designers and engineers during the product life cycle. For the other sources, authoring tools and workbenches can be designed to interactively build up the necessary knowledge.