CoGenTex, Inc. - CogentHelp

CogentHelp

CogentHelp is an authoring tool for on-line application help, developed by CoGenTex under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II award from Rome Laboratory (USAF). CogentHelp partially automates the production of help for graphical user interfaces (GUIs), by compiling human-authored help "snippets" associated with each component of an application's GUI into a well-structured, interconnected HTML-based help system. It also generates help topics dynamically, so that they reflect the current state of the application at runtime.

Screenshot

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Features

Supports Java applets, allowing applications as well as their on-line help to be deployed over intranets or the Web.

Automatically checks consistency of GUI-oriented help topics with the application itself, informing the help author of any missing or obsolete topics.

Automates most of the "drudge" work of constructing a complex system of hypertext documents with consistent formatting and style.

Provides navigation support through expandable table of contents; web search engines can also be integrated.

Supports integration of hand-written topics with topics that are generated from help "snippets".

Supports extensive customization, through CoGenTex's Exemplars framework.

Additional Materials

CogentHelp Walk-through

For more information

Contact .

Papers

Caldwell, David and White, Michael (1997). CogentHelp: A Tool for Authoring Dynamically Generated Help for Java GUIs. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Computer Documentation (SIGDOC '97), Salt Lake City, UT, pp. 17-22.

[Acrobat, 71 Kb]

White, Michael and Caldwell, David (1997). CogentHelp: NLG Meets SE in a Tool for Authoring Dynamically Generated On-Line Help. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Washington, DC, pp. 257-264. [GZipped PostScript, 135 Kb]