Document Engineering for E-Business

It can be said that "document exchange" is the "mother of all patterns" for business (and for e-business). Yet, by itself this view isn't sufficiently prescriptive. In this paper, we present additional perspectives or frameworks that make this abstraction more rigorous and useful. We describe an approach to artifact-driven analysis, model refinement, and implementation for document-intensive systems that unifies the "document analysis" approach from publishing and the "data analysis" approach from information systems. These traditionally contrasting approaches to understanding documents are unified in an "Analysis Spectrum" in which presentational, structural, and content components assume different weights or status. Our methodology emphasizes reuse with a "Reuse Matrix," in which both business process (or document exchange) patterns and document schema patterns are organized by different levels of abstraction and scope. Enterprise-level patterns like "supply chain" and "marketplace" can fit into this matrix along with process patterns like "RosettaNet PIP" and document patterns like the "XML Common Business Library." Taken together, these concepts form the foundation of a new discipline: "Document Engineering for e-Business.