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Analysis of the Approaches/Lessons Learned

After the conclusion of the term, several students continued working on the cognitive architectures documents, combining them into a single document for eventual permanent posting on the World Wide Web. This section presents an analysis of the students' original documents, concentrating mostly on how the documents could be improved to aid readability by other users.

Because the contents of this document was known beforehand, unlike the somewhat organic evolution of the group documents during the course of the semester, the structure and organization of the combined document could be determined before any work began. The students identified several issues for the new organization which they considered crucial based on their own experience in designing and using the documents. These included:

These issues will now be considered with a discussion of the way they drove the final document design which is shown in Figure 6. As is evident here, the combined document adopted a hierarchical structure with index nodes for each architecture similar to Group 3's, individual (single idea) topic nodes and most of the extra features developed by the groups.

wrayre@eecs.umich.edu