Last week, Raymond Yee mentioned in my newsgroup that there's a name for one of my enduring interests: document engineering. And a website that describes an upcoming symposium.
ACM Symposium On Document Engineering 2001
Call For Papers Atlanta, Georgia
November 9-10, 2001
In cooperation with ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGWEB
Computer-based systems for creating, distributing, and analyzing
documents are one of the centerpieces of the new "Information
Society." Documents are no longer static, physical entities. New document technology allows us to create globally interconnected systems that store information drawn from many media and deliver that information as active documents that adapt to the needs of their users. Furthermore, document technologies like XML are having a profound impact on data modeling in general because of the way they bridge and integrate a variety of paradigms (database, object-oriented, and structured document).
Document engineering is an emerging discipline within computer science that investigates systems for documents in any form and in all media. Like software engineering, document engineering is concerned with principles, tools, and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, and maintain documents.
Glad to hear it! Documents, after all, contain most of the data that we create, exchange, and consume. They are the currency of the networked, knowledge-based economy. They're as common as dirt, but scratch the surface and you'll find deep mysteries lurking within.
Consider the humble text file. We like to imagine that it's a stream of characters (bytes) delimited by separators (newlines). But of course the characters and the separators can be represented by a variety of single- or multi-byte sequences. When we happen to collaborate with others who use the same computer systems and the same encodings, we tend to wish these differences away.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
