The SGML standard for a technical documents writing assistance system

We have designed a Writing Assistance System the aim of which is to provide adapted tools to improve the production and the management of technical documents in the space domain. To address the need for document exchange between several actors, documents handled in our project, have to be standardized according to the international standard SGML. A generic tagging (DTD) enables the definition of the logical structure of a set of documents. Several editing modes exist to produce documents but whatever the selected mode, the initial document must undergo several successive processes to finally obtain a SGML document. Very often, the writing of a new document requires the re-use of existing documents or parts thereof. That is why our assistance tool has an Information Retrieval System using a natural language query system to restore information. It is based on a statistical linguistic approach which is enhanced by the use of the SGML document structure. We have noticed that document handling still has areas unvolved besides the obvious advantages of structured documentation.