Importance

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Abstract

A computer method and apparatus for generating and maintaining a structured collection of documents describing a desired system is provided. A conceptual model of the desired system includes entities and relationships among the entities. An entity-relationship diagram is representative of the desired system. Documents are categorized and subsequently maintained with respect to the entities in the entity-relationship diagram. A hierarchy of process-message matrices is employed to determine the communications or dynamic exchanges of message entities in the modeled system and reflected in the entity-relationship diagram. A relational database implements the model and holds document contents (i.e., actual information) needed to automatically generate the collection of documents in a complete formatted manner for printing and/or compiling through word processing and/or compilation and linking means. The database further enables automatic hypertext generation by mapping interdependencies (relationships) between the entities into interdependencies (links) between the documents. One application of the invention automatically generates and maintains a collection of hypertext documents describing a business system.

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First Claim