AN OPEN HYPERMEDIA SOLUTION TO INFORMATION OVERLOAD IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS.
Richard Crowder‡, Gary Wills†, Ian Heath‡, Wendy Hall ‡.
Presented at IEE colloquium on IT Strategies for Information Overload Thursday, 3 December 1997
‡Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.
†Department of Electrical Engineering University of Southampton.
Abstract
The information resources required within the manufacturing environment is constantly increasing. Managing these resources to enable users to find vital information is now becoming a critical issue. This paper proposes an approach to information overload that uses industrial strength hypermedia to manage these information resources. The strategy proposed ensures that the cost of implementing such a system is minimised by allows documentation to remain in its original format. The work discussed is with particular reference to factory-floor activities with manufacturing.
2. Industrial Strength Hypermedia.
3. Problems Facing Manufacturing Enterprises
4. Large Hypermedia Applications.
As the volume of information within an organisation increases, managing the information becomes a critical issue. An engineering information management strategy must be able to integrate information resources that are in different formats, and allow personnel with differing skills, effective and controlled access to satisfy their individual information requirements. In addition the integrity of any stored information must be maintained by the implementation of suitable change control, and associated security measures.
Crowder et al [1] have demonstrated that, by using an open hypermedia system, a common information resource base can be used for operator training, planned maintenance, and diagnostics. They have also demonstrated how such a system can overcome some of the common problems with traditional computer- or paper-based systems, which present and distribute text and engineering drawings sequentially. This paper proposes a factory wide strategy for managing the growing number of electronic information resources in a manufacturing environment by using hypermedia.
Industrial Strength Hypermedia.
In her paper, Malcolm [2], argued for the development of industrial strength hypermedia, where systems must evolve beyond the stand alone status to become a technology that integrates resource over the complete engineering enterprise.
As is widely appreciated, a hypermedia system is where the concepts of hypertext are applied to multimedia information resources. Hypertext is applied to unstructured text, with associations between the text being made with links. In practice hypermedia allows association to be made between different types of media, including documents, engineering drawings, databases, and spreadsheets.
To be viable the hypermedia resource base must operate factory wide, and not centred on a single piece of plant. The solution, in part, is the incorporation of sophisticated software agents with the information resource management system. The objectives of the agents, some of which are being currently developed at Southampton, will provide the additional functionality to the information environment, the following are typical of those required:
The research discussed in this paper makes use of Microcosm, a commercial hypermedia software package, developed at the University of Southampton. Microcosm is an open hypermedia system [3] that separates links from the information resource. This enables the documents to be stored in different locations, in their original format. Microcosm allows the user to navigate through the document resource base using a number of different link mechanisms. The links can be arranged in link databases (linkbases) to represent different cognitive and pedagogical structures.
Problems Facing Manufacturing Enterprises
With the ever increasing volume of interrelated information within manufacturing industry, a number of difficulties arise with conventional information retrieval techniques, in particular:
In certain environments attempts to make information more manageable, can in itself lead to problems. The trend to section electrical and mechanical schematics is an example of how information can become unusually complex and disorientating. If the schematic is displayed on a computer screen, sectioning will result, as the screen can only display an area of the drawing being considered, it is possible to develop a linking structure and navigational support that will give the user the feel of using the complete sheet. However as the user zooms into a particular area, it is possible to become disorientated and loose detail.
As the information provided with an organisation become more complex, it is inevitable that information overload will occur, making the information less usable. When the information can not be retrieved with ease, it is human nature to work without it. Users will increasingly rely on previous knowledge and intuition rather than coping with the cumbersome documentation. As a result, tasks are poorly performed, and take an excessive time, Ventura [4], illustrates the cause and effect that leads to this conclusion.
If a change is made to an electronic documentation retrieval system a solution is available. However the switch to electronic document provision is not straight forward, largely due to the poor understanding of how paper manuals are authored and used.
While the scope for electronic management of documentation is considerable, and is capable of giving considerable benefits to an organisation, it must not be considered in isolation from the organisations corporate goals and memory. It has been argued that an electronic document management system can be considered to be equivalent to a human’s long term memory, while in practice a far more flexible short term, context based, retrieval system needs to act as a buffer between the user and the electronic document management system. This can be implemented using an open hypermedia system.
The previous section has discussed the problems associated with documentation, this section identifies problems related to the complete organisation memory. Organisations have to rely on a common knowledge base that embodies all the information that is relevant to its operation. Subjects that need to be considered for inclusion into an organisational memory include, strategic planning, project proposals and management, patents, product design, and marketing strategies. It should be noted that in all cases it is not only the raw documentation that is required, it is also the underlying decision rationales. In his briefing paper, Boy [5] identified that the solution to this problem not only is it a technology problem but also requires study of the psychological and social aspects.
In order to capture the full organisation memory a company will need to capture, store and index the complete decision making process. Research has indicated that this may require the videoing of meeting, and other similar procedures. It can easily be recognised that a considerable minority of the Organisation’s Memory is not formally documented but exists in log book, corporate procedures, and peoples individual experiences.
Large Hypermedia Applications.
In an industrial environment the structure of the information is generally hierarchical and will often relate to physical object and not just concepts. Hence, the same piece of equipment can be used in different parts of the organisation. In addition, different people, from different departments carrying out different tasks use the same information. In most industrial environments the structure of the information is defined by:
This naturally creates different views of the information depending on who is access the information, which task they are undertaking, and what piece (if any) of equipment is being used or worked on. Hence there is no single structure to represent the information. Using the principles of linking in hypermedia, any number of information structures are possible. However by using the ‘natural’ hierarchies that exist within the organisation, several charts can be produced. These charts can then be used to aid authoring and give an initial structure to the information. By using these ‘natural’ hierarchies responsibilities for maintaining the different areas within the information space can be allocated.
The authoring strategy for industrial strength hypermedia comes directly from the design strategy and will include aspects of the best practice of paper based documentation management system and hypermedia authoring.
The paradigm for viewing large electronic text documents is different than that for paper. For example a manual will have chapters, sub-sections, etc. In the paper paradigm these have to be physically bound together, and usually to save paper follow immediate after each other on the same page. Therefore if a user requires the information in a sub-section of a chapter they will normally have to flick through the pages until they find the correct section. Hypermedia allows the developers to 'dissect' the paper based documents into chapters and then sub-sections, or nodes. The nodes are then linked together, so that the original structure intended by the author is still available. As the documentation is dissected into nodes, meaningful labels or titles are to be used for each dissection. Hence the user will be able to navigate a technical manual by using a contents page, or step through the nodes in the order intended by the author, or jump straight to the section from another document. Salton et al. [6] has shown that by dividing the articles of an encyclopaedia into sections and subsections, each identified by an appropriate section heading, a query can be successfully refined. Having separate subsections that are complete in themselves will aid navigation of the system, and also aid updating and revision control.
Within many organisations a process line consists of several major pieces of equipment that are integrated together, which lends itself to zonal sectioning. Hence the hypermedia information for each of these pieces of equipment can be authored separately using a framework consisting of all the necessary engineering and hypermedia specific information. These individual zones become objects of information. The overall framework then allows the integration of these subsystems to form the overall application. A subsystem itself may contain several other separately authored smaller hypermedia subsystems. These smaller hypermedia subsystems can be created ‘off-line’. This will enhance the portability and modularization of the information. The developers of the hypermedia system are still able to use the current tools and techniques on the smaller applications.
When developing a hypermedia application the linking information for each of the smaller applications is held in a separate link database. This will increases the maintainability of the hypermedia application, especially during revision control.
The procedures for documentation control will vary from company to company, and the application being developed is designed to adapt to these differences. This is achieved by not replacing the companies' documentation system, but working with it. However the links themselves are sources of information as much as a line of text or an object in a drawing. Hence it is necessary for the hypermedia system, in the revision control process, to log the changes made to the application linkbases, when the documents are updated. By using the hierarchical structures of the information space and integrating the smaller hypermedia applications, revision control becomes easier. That is, as a smaller hypermedia application is amended only the linkbase associated with the application needs to be ‘frozen’ and stored as part of the change process. In the same way a copy of the document prior to the amendment is kept as part of the document change procedure. In addition, only the linkbase that have been effective by the change need be ‘frozen’. Hence, reducing even further the amount of information stored after an amendment to a document.
An important part of the information overload problem addresses the management and integration of legacy information systems. This can be considered as two distinct, but highly related themes, that of managing the physical legacy resources, followed by their integration where possible into a single unified information resource for organisation wide use. As the information already exists in an existing database, or electronic (or even paper) document management system the implications of integration must be fully understood. This includes the current usage of information, the cost effectiveness of integration, and its viability over a period of time.
To ensure satisfactory delivery of the required information to the user, the development of a common terminology for users will be required, which will lead to the development of a metadata layer within our existing hypermedia model.
For any solution to the problems of legacy systems to be acceptable to users, the perceived information structure must be contiguous, even though a number of federated databases may need to be accessed at any one time. The objective being the development of an integrating information environment.
The industrial environment brings together a wide range of users with different and varying computer skills. Therefore, the user’s interface requirements vary. Two significant requirements of the interface have been identified:
To cater for these requirements a control strategy for the user interface has been developed. This control strategy is termed SHEP [7]. SHEP will provide an adaptive user interface that can be configured on a person-by-person basis. The shop-floor operators could still use the simple single-document-plus-toolbar interface. While, maintainers can have more control, and access to other tools, office personnel can have information from other information systems appearing as a part of their current windowing environment with, perhaps, little system control. Flexible interfaces are essential in an industrial environment. With the vast diversity of system users, a single interface will never be able to encompass all of the users individual needs.
In this paper we have proposed a solution to the critical issue of electronic resource management in an advanced manufacturing environment. The proposed strategy takes into account the requirement and restraints of an industrial environment, including legacy systems, revision control, different users requirements, and the cost of implementation.
The strategy has been used to design and implement an industrial hypermedia system, which is currently under development. Although, the system will be initially dedicated to one major process line, the concepts of information resource management for the whole factory are being proven.
The authors acknowledge the EPSRC for funding the work under grant numbers GR/H/43038 and GR/L/10482.