Document engineering

Document engineering is a document-centric synthesis of complementary ideas from information and systems analysis, electronic publishing, business process analysis, and business informatics to ensure that the documents and processes make sense to the people and applications that need them. Originating from research published by Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath, document engineering attempts to unify these different analysis and modeling perspectives and helps to specify, design, and implement documents and the processes that create and consume them.

In the context of document engineering, document generally refers to ordered pieces of information used by computer applications or web services rather than directly by people. It has particular relevance in the areas of XML vocabulary design. The principles of document engineering were applied to the development of the OASIS Universal Business Language.A simple application of document Engineering I n the business field is where a customer purchases something online. This purchase involves three different business collaborations which include; between the customer and the online catalog to select the right item, between the retail shop and a credit card authorization service for verification and to charge the customer account and finally between the retail shop and delivery service in order to ensure the item is delivered to the customer. In order to actualize these internet information exchanges, there is need for document engineering for the analysis, design and implementation of the same.[1]

From 2003 to 2007, the University of California, Berkeley operated a research center for document engineering, which has been subsumed by its program in Information and Service Design.[2]

The conventional discipline that most resembles document engineering is probably business informatics. However, document engineering emphasizes the need for conceptual modeling of documents and processes at an implementable granularity.

The ACM Symposium on Document Engineering[3] is a yearly conference of computer scientists interested in text or document processing.