Electronic Document Description

Abstract

We have characterized documents as records of messages that have content, structure and metadata. There may be several ways of describing messages using these three constituents. The choice of which to use depends on how the messages themselves are used and accessed. For example, authorship of a document may be part of the content of a document, an attribute of a document, or both. Similarly, it may not be easy to extract the structure of a document, and it may be helpful to do so only if certain parts of a document are needed or if documents with particular structural properties are required.