Assembling documents from digital libraries

Abstract

We consider assembling documents using, as a source, a digital library containing SGML documents. The assembly process contains two parts: 1) finding interesting fragments, and 2) constructing a coherent document. We present a general document assembly framework. First, we describe a system for tailoring control engineering textbooks. Its assembling facilities are rather restricted but, on the other hand, the quality of documents produced is high. Second, we address the problem of filtering and combining interesting information from a large heterogeneous document collection. The methods presented offer various ways to find the interesting document fragments. Moreover, the elements found in the fragments are mapped to generic elements, like sections, paragraph containers, paragraphs and strings, which have known semantics. Hence, even arbitrary compositions can be formatted and printed.

This work was supported by the Finnish Technology Development Centre (TEKES).