RE: Help systems, was: (no subject)

["Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentstar com>]

>Most of the time the questions are not very unique. Most problems comes
from
>porly designed navigation systems and a failure to use the same words for
>the same things, ie the author of the help system (or whatever
>documentation)
>uses different words compared to the users. He simply can't find "his"
>problem.
>If the author of a help system have a list of the different items the
>users ask for he usually will see the missunderstandings quite fast.

Which dovetails nicely with having synonyms and similar questions mapped to
the same answer.

>Just a thought.. Boeing(?) uses a documentation system based upon XML and a
>database. If someone needs information about a gadget somewhere in the
plane
>you can print out complete descriptions for how to get from A to B. If a
>help system is built around something similar you can get from "present
>state"
>to some wanted "future state" by following a generated list of
descriptions.
>Compared to todays "This is the FOO gadget and it works like this..." I
>belive this will be much more useful because it describes what you *want to
do*,
>not what the different parts of an application *can do*.

Well, the 'clustering and outlier grouping' that I've suggested elsewhere
essentially tells how closely two documents/pieces of information are
related to each other based upon their content and should create such a map
automatically.  The idea was intended to eliminate the need for filing
information in specific categories, and to avoid being trapped by the
categories and filing methods of another individual (as were the synonym
search and fuzzy search...).  I'd love to apply them to the help system,
filing system, and email searching.  I believe that with such capabilities,
Gnome would become THE information management system of choice.

Tom M.
TomM Pentstar com