BIBLE: a system for Design and Management of Context-Controlled Documents
Résumé
International standards for the representation of structured documents like ODA [1S08613 89] or SGML [ISO8679 86] are well adapted for the design and the generation of long and sophisticated documents like books or technical documentation. But, in the tertiary industry, most documents are intended for clients. Their constitution depends on the client profile. For these documents, the traditional document processing model (figure 1) is inappropriate, it is necessary to introduce an intermediate step between editing and formatting. This step permits choice of content and structure based on the client profile. We call this new phase the automatic design (figure 2). Between this new phase and the editing process, we need a specific logical structure with variable parts. We use the term context-controlled to express that the description of the document depends on external information coming from the client profile. A structured document is described by a fixed indiscriminate logic of subordination. To represent a variable subordination, a context-controlled document also contains instructions on how to use variables from the client profile. Some of these instructions are specific to one document, but other concern a type of document. So, they can be specified in the document model. All models are gathered in a document database. Modularity allows us to create new models by reusing existing modules. But, this concept doesn’t provide for modification of shared module neither does it introduce a sufficient structure for modelling large numbers of models. We have resolved this problem by using inheritance. This concept permits us to structure the document database in an tree like manner. Both the modelling of the document database and the working of editors are described by using an object-oriented approach.
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