The Polaris On-Line Help Project
The Polaris Help System is Carnegie Mellon University's integrated computer help system. The Polaris Help System will provide the campus community with on-line documentation that can be accessed by Macintoshes, UNIX workstations, and PCs. The Polaris system will provide both in-house and vendor-supplied documentation.
To use the Polaris system, a viewer such as Netscape or Mosaic is required. The user
can navigate through the help system as desired by browsing through linked files or by searching for a specific term.
Overview | Goals | Contacts
The Polaris Help system uses HTTP as the transport layer and uses CERN's HTTP daemon to interface with our search engine. In order to use this system an HTML viewer or web client must be used, as all of the help files are in HTML. The technical portion of this service has an expected lifetime of 2 to 5 years following deployment.
The Polaris help system provides on-line documentation for the following CMU-supported platforms:
- Unix: Solaris 2.5.1 (Sun Microsystems)
- Unix: HPUX 9.0.3 (Hewlett Packard)
- Unix: Ultrix 4.2a (DECstation)
- Microsoft Windows 3.1/DOS 6.2 (PC)
- MacOS 7.0.1 (Macintosh)
For more information about how the Polaris system is set up and maintained, read "The Polaris Help System: Care and Feeding." An HTML and a PostScript version are below.
- To provide on-line documentation to the campus community.
Types of documentation included:
- documentation developed in-house
- documentation available electronically from various vendors
Sets of documentation included:
- The Cursor newsletter (computing news at CMU).
- UNIX man pages for all platforms.
- Help files (written and maintained by the CMU's documentation staff).
- Policy statements
- Manuals
- Information on data communications.
- Computer cluster hours
- To make this information available on UNIX (both X and terminal interfaces), Mac and PC.
- To keep the documentation up to date through regular maintenance and review.
- To provide a server and the support to keep this server running.
- To provide search capabilities for all of this documentation:
- full text searches
- indexed key field searches
- To set up a feed-back mechanism through the Advisor service for comments, criticisms and suggested updates.
- To keep statistics and records on usage.
- To restrict usage to select groups.
Technical Contact
Project Management
Robert Kuszewski
Mark Held
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