Document Centric Environments: combining the solving and documentation processes

SUMMARY All disciplines of engineering rely on numerical processing and visualisation for solving design problems and therefore benefit from support environments. These environments should provide a mechanism for integrating different tools and streamline the process of solving other problems of similar type. Users can be provided with a consistent interface to the required tool allowing them to process problem specific data with ease and convenience. One important source of this convenience could be that the original problem solver completely documents the process of solving the problem. This is easier said than done, since the process of documentation is usually seen as a separate undertaking from the process of obtaining the solution. An answer to this problem is to combine the process of designing the problem solution with documentation of the process solution. To do this, a document centred environment is required which encourages designers to think of the process of problem solving as an activity, which stems from the process of documenting. This paper describes such an environment and various aspects of its realisation. A document paradigm is used from the user-interface of the environment to its repository. The whole environment is implemented in Java, with the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) used to describe the structure of the document. The documents produced by the environment act as the integrators of tools, which aid in the problem-solving process in various scientific and engineering domains. Two example problems, one dealing with control system design and other with computational fluid dynamics are used for illustration. Copyright c � 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.