Document Engineering : Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services

Much of the business transacted on the Web today takes place through information exchanges made possible by using documents as interfaces. For example, what seems to be a simple purchase from an online bookstore actually involves at least three different business collaborations?between the customer and the online catalog to select a book; between the bookstore and a credit card authorization service to verify and charge the customer's account; and between the bookstore and the delivery service with instructions for picking up and delivering the book to the customer. Document engineering is needed to analyze, design, and implement these Internet information exchanges. This book is an introduction to the emerging field of document engineering.

The authors, both leaders in the development of document engineering and other e-commerce initiatives, analyze document exchanges from a variety of perspectives. Taking a qualitative view, they look at patterns of document exchanges as components of business models; looking at documents in more detail, they describe techniques for analyzing individual transaction patterns and the role they play in the overall business process. They describe techniques for analyzing, designing, and encoding document models, including XML, and discuss the techniques and architectures that make XML a unifying technology for the next generation of e-business applications. Finally, they go beyond document models to consider management and strategic issues?the business model, or the vision, that the information exchanged in these documents serves.

User review
Good ideas spoiled by bad typography
I really should like this book - it's highly related to what I do and I love my job. There were a number of good nuggets of information and references that I will find useful however I found I had a great deal of trouble reading the actual text - I found it boring. The large print, gaps between the lines and the stretched filled spacing of each line made it difficult to quickly scan paragraphs and grasp the gist of what was being said, even when rereading. The grid diagrams were also problematic - they all had the same look - there was little that was memorable about them. The authors also often used round about wording where more direct statements would have been clearer.

As an experiment I typed a couple of random paragraphs from the text and found that they made a lot more sense. I also showed the text around to some of my co-workers and got the same reactions. Given the title of the book it is somewhat ironic that it should have this kind of a problem, but the book deals with principles for the automated transformation of content, not effective presentation style.

Better editing would have made a better book.

User review
I didn't get the info for which I was looking out of it
I was lured by the title and reviews hoping to get insight on how to generically define large documents that could easily be extended as requirements change and consumed by a wide variety of clients using different arbitrary programming languages. I didn't learn anything new about extensibility, and programming languages are absent from this book.

Instead the book seems to be a somewhat dated look at a high level process for using documents in a service oriented architecture. The calendar example application seems too simple to translate into a more complex real life application. The approach described for `document engineering` is much more reminiscent of waterfall style development approaches rather than lean/agile techniques.

I also found the text very difficult to read; it's very dry.

Perhaps this book is useful for some, but it certainly isn't helpful for everybody.

User review
Very relevant for anyone designing Web Services
Component modeling, analysis of information exchanges, and
application services usage patterns are critical areas to focus
on in designing internal and external interfaces exposed by
enterprises, ASPs/SaaS, and other consumer-oriented internet
services. We have many good examples of scalable, evolvable,
easy to integrate and interoperable Web Services API in the
consumer-oriented internet industry currently. The areas
covered in the DOCUMENT ENGINEERING is very relevant to
architects, product managers, developers and technology
executives. I especially found the design patterns and process
discussion helpful. I would recommend this book to anyone
interested in services oriented application platforms, internal
and external enterprise integration to employ in the design
phase since it covers an effective methodology of designing
interfaces based on the document-centric component model.

Zahid Ahmed
San Jose, CA


User review
explains well SOA, Web Services and semantics
The book is a refreshingly understandable approach to explaining Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services and the Semantic Web. Other texts often drown the reader in hugely verbose XML examples. But here, the authors achieve clarity in discussing the essence of the above concepts. The XML snippets are clear, without being overly long.

You can also see why interoperability issues might inevitably arise in a loosely coupled Web Services environment. Often due to differing semantic meanings attached to the same fields in a common document structure. The book touches upon hard problems of ontologies and how the different meanings might be accomodated in a realistic deployment of distributed Web Services.

User review
Comprehensive and Practical
Document Engineering is a practical exploration of the role documents play in the nexus of contracts that drive modern businesses. The interdisciplinary approach put forward here, taking document engineering out of the realm of pure software engineering, is eye opening and provides some real insight into what it takes to make Service Oriented Architectures work in the real world. This is an absolute must read book for anyone seriously considering developing an XML based document integration strategy.