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Abstract:
Different business models imply distinct patterns in inter- and intra-company
coordination as implemented in information (and document) exchanges. The
nature and repertoire of these patterns evolves whenever new information
technologies emerge. In the 19th century the teletype and telephone made
it possible to coordinate business activities at a scale vastly larger
than before, leading to the rise of the modern corporation. In the late
20th and early 21st centuries we have been witnessing the equally profound
impact of the Web and electronic mail -- and soon with XML -- on how businesses
work. Put simply -- Information technology enables (1) more frequent
information exchanges (2) more granular information exchanges and (3)
information exchanges with more partners.
But exchanging information does no good if the information can’t
be understood by the parties (or applications) doing the exchanging. Document
Engineering is evolving as a new discipline for specifying, designing,
and implementing the electronic documents that request or provide interfaces
to business processes via web-based services. Encoding these information
models in XML creates an automatable standards-based foundation for real-world
business computing systems, bridging the traditional chasms between design,
implementation, and evolution.
Good Document Engineering practice emphasizes the reuse of existing models
or patterns, many of which are encoded at the implementation level in
the form of EDI and XML vocabularies. Other patterns are at more conceptual
levels in terms of common business processes or in patterns for the organization
of activities between businesses using supply chains, marketplaces or
hubs.
Document Engineering is being taught to graduate students at UC Berkeley
and has been successfully applied to problems of significant scale, including
efforts to develop an enterprise data architecture for the e-Berkeley
initiative and the Universal Business Language effort at OASIS.
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