Towards a Flexible Notion of Document Context

摘要

Much of the scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical knowledge that enables modern society is laid down and communicated in technical documents. Due to their static presentation presentation of the complex issues involved, they remain inaccessible to most readers and pose formidable barriers even for experts. To enable advanced interactions which would support understanding, software systems will have to incorporate machine-understandable (formal) information, while retaining the informal nature of the documents, which allows efficient communication of ideas and methods between humans. The simplistic dichotomy between "formal" (as expressed in a logic;) and "informal" (everything else) is not helpful as a guide for designing representation formats for context. As a step towards a remedy we propose the notion of flexibly formal representations (flexiforrns) based on the analysis of document content and its context in the Software Engineering project SAMSDocs where we elicited a formal context for an informal document collection.