Adaptation of Mathematical Documents
Christine H. Müller · 2010
This work applies the topic-oriented principles of modularisation and reuse to the narrative authoring paradigm. Narrative documents are modularised into infoms, for which transitional phrases and cross-references are marked. Infoms and their semantic/narrative dependencies as well as variant relations are modelled as graphs. These graphs are processed during the content planning of narrative documents during which appropriate infoms are selected and arranged according to a user context. Since narrative transitions are visualised by words and phrases, they can reduce the adaptability of infoms. To improve the exchangeability of infoms, infoms are thus enriched with alternative narrative transitions. With this enrichment, appropriate narrative transitions can be selected according to the combination and arrangement of document parts into user-specific documents. To illustrate the proposed adaptation services for narrative documents, mathematical documents are used. This decision required the author to take an essential aspect of mathematical text into account: The adaptation of mathematical notations. The author proposes a comprehensive framework that allows users to configure notations as well as to guide the content planning of mathematical documents regarding a semantic, narrative, and user context. To prioritise these contexts and to guide the adaptation, a combination of extensional and intensional options is provided. These give users full control over any step of the adaptation workflow: the specification of which document parts should be adapted and which should remain unchanged, the collection of adaptation objects (notation preferences, infoms, and context parameters), and the user-specific selection of the most appropriate objects to be applied in the rendering, substitution, and ordering of document parts.