It has long been recognized that certain kinds of vital information — usually informal and unstructured, often having to do with why certain actions are taken — are usually lost in large projects. One explanation may be that this kind of information, while important, is too unstructured to be readily captured and retrieved. We report on a field study in which a simple structuring method (IBIS, for Issue-Based Information System) was used over an extended period of time to record and allow retrieval of a significant quantity of precisely this kind of information, using very simple technology. We draw some implications for hypertext and GroupWare, and for the prospect of supporting the design process with technology.

We argue that in domains where a strong notion of salience can be defined, it can be used to provide: (1) an elegant solution to the selection problem, i.e. the problem of how to decide whether a given fact should or should not be mentioned in the text; and (2) a simple and direct control framework for the entire deep generation process, coordinating proposing, planning, and realization. (Deep generation involves reasoning about conceptual and rhetorical facts, as opposed to the narrowly linguistic reasoning that takes place during realization.) We report on an empirical study of salience in pictures of natural scenes, and its use in a computer program that generates descriptive paragraphs comparable to those produced by people.