Designing hypermedia documentation for safety critical training applications

Abstract

This paper discusses the requirements for authoring methodologies for large multimedia systems to be used for technical education documentation in the domain of "safety critical" industries and presents work which contributes to the development of a methodology for their design. Such documentation is typically required to serve both for training purposes and for direct support of engineers in the field. This dual-purpose nature means that documents are typically complex with multiple navigation paths. The documentation used to train for and support maintenance and repair may itself be safety critical, in that incorrect documentation can lead to incorrect maintenance procedures. Research into "industrial strength" hypermedia has tended to concentrate on the issues of robustness and data integrity, while the issues of design methodologies for such systems have not received as much attention. These issues include those of the verifiable correctness of such systems, both in terms of their content and other issues such as sequence of presentation. It is argued that the addressing of these issues is essential to the development of technical documentation systems that are of sufficient quality to be used for safety critical applications such as within the transport industry. The requirements that viable design methodologies for these applications must address are discussed, and a methodology is proposed, based on traditional authoring methods and process algebra-based formal specification and verification.