A Multi-viewed Document Representation for Semantic Document Exchange

Abstract

Exact document interpretation is very important to semantic document exchange. An essential issue for document interpretation is to maintain semantic consistency of the exchanged documents between any two autonomous business communities, where the document sender and receiver have no misunderstanding in using the exchanged documents. Existing approaches to resolving this issue adopt document standards or apply business ontologies. While these approaches are effective in certain degree, the issue of limited flexibility and evolvement in using standards and the lack of accuracy in using ontologies to mediate document elements must be explored and resolved. This paper proposes a multi-viewed tabular document (Tabdoc) approach to achieving consistent document interpretation between document writers and readers. In this approach, any document is a table, which is seen as a tree to represent document structure. Concepts, layout and grammatical relations of a same document are separated from the document structure and form different views in Tabdoc model.