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Living Documents
Living Documents was a research project at
the University of
Tübingen in Germany aimed at designing a lightweight document
management system.
Research objectives and approach
Our goals are to design and implement a lightweight document
management system based on the concept of Living
Documents. In particular we have the following objectives:
- Specification of a document metaphor called
Living Document which turns (ordinary)
documents into intelligent, mobile, and "self-contained" micro servers.
-
Provision of generic knowledge representation mechanisms
based on XML to store, retrieve, and reason upon arbitrary kinds of
document-related meta data.
-
Design of a lightweight data store for context-related information.
The data store should manage primarily temporal
and spatial information. Each document should have its own contextual
data store.
-
Since Living Documents are self-sufficient and autonomous
entities, appropriate cooperation and coordination facilities have to be
provided. Adapt and extend state-of-the-art event notification
systems used in the research area of mobile agents to interconnect
Living Documents in a loosely coupled manner.
- Determination and evaluation of challenging applications for
Living Documents in the area of information retrieval.
In particular we are interested in complex, context-aware document systems in
decentralized environments.
Description
Living Document is a document metaphor which
embeds active, intelligent and mobile capabilities into the document
itself as opposed to traditional document systems. In traditional
document systems the business logic (application logic) and the data
(documents) are separated from each other: According to a n-tier
client-server architecture the business logic is kept at the middle
tier managed by an application server whereas the documents are stored
in a database system based on a appropriate database schema.
A Living Document is characterized by the
following key properties:
- It is an active document since it has reactive and
proactive capabilities. It senses its surrounding environment and
is notified about particular events and changes of the
environmental state. Living Documents are
loosely interconnected with each other by subscribing to a event
notification middleware system. The asynchrony, heterogeneity, and
inherent loose coupling that characterize applications such as
document and content management systems in a wide-area network
(e.g. Internet) promote event interaction as a natural design
abstraction.
- Each Living Document incorporates a
so-called semi-structured knowledge repository. It provides
facilities to store and retrieve information related to the
document. Basically a knowledge repository contains a set of meta
data about the document itself. Each meta data is referred to as a
document state information. A set of document state information
builds a so-called document state report (DSR) which contains
information about document behavior over an arbitrary period of
time (See Deploying
distributed state information in mobile agents systems). A DSR
contains temporal and spatial context information. For example, it
contains contextual information about who has accessed the document
or when the document's attributes have been modified. In
addition, it can contain helpful links to other Living Documents which have some kind of relationship
between each other. Basically, a knowledge repository serves as an
uniform representation for meta data which builds the basis for
intelligent processing mechanisms as described in [1] Deduction on XML
documents: A Case Study. Furthermore, it provides an uniform
access point for searching of any kind of document-related meta
data which simplifies an automated interaction among "agentified"
Living Documents.
- Our programming model for Living
Documents is centered around the concept of mobile
agents where each document is turned into an autonomous
program. It is capable to move through the network of
interconnected and interlinked documents to search for information
or to accomplish a given task assigned by a user for example. See
Okeanos - A Framework for Mobile Agents for design and implementation
details of our mobile agents framework.
Conceptually each Living Document is viewed
as a mobile micro server which provides access to and service
facilities for documents. The technical basis of Living Documents is an innovative type of document and
content management system which deploys mobile code capabilities and
knowledge-related processing facilities.
People involved in the project
by Ralf-Dieter
Schimkat
http://www-sr.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/~schimkat
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http://www.living-documents.org