Preserving Users’ Knowledge of Contemporary and Legacy Computer Systems
klaus rechert Dragan Espenschied Rafael Gieschke Wendy Hagenmaier
Preserving and ensuring access to operational knowledge is essential for future users of emulation technologies. Emulation allows for the collection of a vast array of computer systems and software products, each requiring specific operational knowledge for effective use. Beyond manuals and documentation, an important source of targeted operational knowledge comes from observing experienced users in action as they interact with these systems. In this article, we propose an automated approach to document user interactions during an emulation session. We then apply computer vision (OCR) and modern large language models (LLMs) to automatically analyze and distill knowledge from the captured data. This process allows the extracted (text-based) information to be easily retrievable via standard search utilities; furthermore, the information is prepared to become actionable for both humans and machines.

Keywords: Documentation, Emulation, Usability, Knowledge Management.
approaches to preservation from document to data