Document Engineering

Much of the business transacted on the Web today takes place through
information exchanges made possible by using documents as interfaces. For example,
what seems to be a simple purchase from an online bookstore actually involves at
least three different business collaborations -- between the customer and the online
catalog to select a book; between the bookstore and a credit card authorization
service to verify and charge the customer's account; and between the bookstore and
the delivery service with instructions for picking up and delivering the book to the
customer. Document engineering is needed to analyze, design, and implement these
Internet information exchanges. This book is an introduction to the emerging field
of document engineering.The authors, both leaders in the development of document
engineering and other e-commerce initiatives, analyze document exchanges from a
variety of perspectives. Taking a qualitative view, they look at patterns of
document exchanges as components of business models; looking at documents in more
detail, they describe techniques for analyzing individual transaction patterns and
the role they play in the overall business process. They describe techniques for
analyzing, designing, and encoding document models, including XML, and discuss the
techniques and architectures that make XML a unifying technology for the next
generation of e-business applications. Finally, they go beyond document models to
consider management and strategic issues -- the business model, or the vision, that
the information exchanged in these documents serves.