Semi-Automatic Ontology-Driven Development Documentation. Generating Documents from RDF Data and DITA Templates

For a data-driven economy, digitization of product information throughout the entire product lifecycle is key to agility and efficiency of product-related processes. Documenting products and their development, e.g., creating requirement specifications, is an indispensable, time-consuming and resource-intensive activity in large organizations. A vast amount of related information often emerges across several siloing lifecycle tools, and only a portion of it is available in the post-hoc documentation. Additionally, numerous product lines and versions additionally increase the documentation effort. To tackle these issues in a research project, we developed a semi-automatic end-to-end documentation system, able to generate documents based on templates and structured data. As a use case for document generation, we employ the RDF-based lifecycle tool integration standard OSLC and add extended publishing information. In order to generate target documents, we leverage DITA, an established digital publishing standard. A pilot implementation demonstrates that the approach is able to extract distributed lifecycle data and to generate several types of documents in multiple formats. Since the method can also be used to generate documents from arbitrary RDF graphs, the results can be generalized to other domains beyond software development. We believe that the results support the change from a document-driven to a data-driven documentation paradigm in large organizations.