Computer support for documentation consistency maintenance

Consideration is given to computer-based techniques for maintaining the internal consistency of documentation in the face of modifications. The author argues that the dependencies between parts of the documentation are an important aspect of the maintenance problem. Techniques for identifying and maintaining dependencies have been implemented in a prototype editor, called HyDIE. Within HyDIE, all documents are represented in terms of their logical structure. The notion of a logical document model underpins both the SGML and ODA document standards. To support an author in identifying dependent parts, HyDIE provides a hypertext linking facility comprising both explicit links and automatically generated links, which usually involve search of some kind