Read the text: Theoretical basis for document and information activity (Part I)

Imagine an aircraft manual that is both reference book and maintenance record. Hook it up to supply catalogs to automatically restock depleted inventories every time a part is taken off the shelf and used to repair the aircraft. Track the repairs made and have the document offer related assemblies that need to be checked if one is found to be worn. Include interactive diagrams that can answer questions or offer alternative views for the technician and the aircraft designer.

Electronic documents are evolving into unprecedented roles. New technologies that utilize XML (eXtensible Markup Language) are emerging that enable documents to become more than the static, passive containers of words, graphics, and images they have been historically. They are business process plus information - archive and interactive knowledge base rolled into one.

These new documents are living and dynamic. They can interact with other content, data, applications, and documents. They are highly structured, yet they are capable of changing their structure and presentation on the fly for different users, contexts, or uses. Some actively launch corporate or interenterprise workflows. With varying degrees of embedded business logic programming, they can invoke functions at various points in a workflow process to automatically gather, retrieve, extract, integrate, and analyze information from a variety of sources, and send it on if needed.

Some are defined to relate to other documents and to incorporate pieces from those documents on the fly to create new documents, making them adaptable and able to automatically, dynamically evolve throughout their lifetimes or the lifetimes of the things they describe.

Active documents are so new that there is no standard for what they look like or what they do. They can be found today in various forms and sizes, and they serve a variety of purposes: A simple active document might be a purchase order that also validates inventory levels and perhaps triggers a reordering of the item, or suggestsalternatives for out-of-stock items. However, an active document can be as complex as an aircraft maintenance manual or other technical documentation that self-updates with approved changes from multiple component vendors as updates are made to components and repair processes.

Fundamentally, active documents are a disruptive technology, bringing with them a wave of sweeping change that will affect not only the software systems that create and interact with them, but also the human systems that define workflow and business processes. IDC believes that this new advance will have a dramatic effect on companies, content infrastructures, the intercompany information chain, and the broader content marketplace.

Documents are discrete containers of information expressed in words, sounds, orpictures. Active documents are XML documents that combine highly structured XML with executable behavior. The code, which may be XML itself or another scripting language, is contained in or attached to the document, but executed by an external processor. To the user, however, it appears that the document contains both information and the actions that are necessary to act on the information. Thus, a document can launch a workflow process or collect data from a database andpopulate a table so that the most recent stock quotes, for instance, that show stocksunder $20 per share whose prices have increased or decreased by x% are displayed.

These documents can create audit trails of actions taken based on their information.

They can automatically aggregate data from multiple active documents, electronic forms, or data sources to provide a composite, roll-up, or summary view. They can update themselves as technical manuals change. In other words, the document becomes dynamic and active in its own representation, interactions, and presentation.

The point is that the document now becomes, for the user, the gateway into themultiple applications that are related to the information. Users eventually will not have to know how to use the database, search, or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications: They will interact with the document. 

They mix code and content, active documents are a good example of a trend we note at IDC: As we move toward a new "information worker" (to use Microsoft’s terminology) environment, the next generations of applications have begun to mix not only code and content, but types of technologies as well. The lines between database and unstructured information applications, portal, and collaborative applications are no longer clear.

Today, active documents are confined largely to active forms, making validation and function calls to databases or to Web services for retrieval. These are early days for the concept. The features vary widely from one product to another, and the applications may be difficult for novice users to master to develop anything more than a simple active document. To create a complex document that has a complicated workflow, is a compound document, or that integrates with many back-end systems, today’s active document author must know where the desired content resides, how to make calls on that repository or ERP system, how to write scripts, and how to create a logical flow of actions or workflow. To create effective active documents, the author must understand the workflow within or across the organization(s) thoroughly.

Information retrieval and data mining often assume a simple world: There are people with information needs who search - and find - information in sources such as documents or databases. Hence, the user-oriented goals are information literacy: the users’ ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information, and tools that obviate the need for some of the technical parts of this information literacy. Examples of such tools are search-engine interfaces that direct each user’s attention to only an individualised part of the “information overload” universe. In an enterprise environment, business information, such as project proposals and product discussions, is dynamic and often embedded in documents and document activities (e.g, emails, Web pages and office documents). Because this information is essential to business processes, corporate employees need an effective means to retrieve it. Some commercial products, including Google Desktop, provide keyword searches for finding some of this information. However, this approach is not always effective as successful keyword searches can be difficult to construct, and even the best queries may fail to find some important materials. In this paper, we present Taste (Temporal Activities and Story TElling), an interactive visual analytics system that enhances the enterprise employee’s capabilities in searching and sharing diverse and dynamic business information. Taste was designed, after interviews with corporate employees, to follow their information retrieval cues and help them manage, review and share the business information embedded in their document activities. Results of our lab and field studies validate that Taste provides employees the confidence and necessary features to more efficiently and effectively retrieve business information from their documents and activities.

I.     Answer the questions:

1. Why electronic documents are business process?

2. Are these new documents living and dynamic or not?

3. What can be found today in various forms and sizes?

4. What are the functions of the documents?

5. What must today’s active document author know?