Document Engineering

Note: this course is now 243: Document Engineering and Information Architecture.

This three-unit course introduces a new discipline of 'Document Engineering' for specifying, designing, and deploying the electronic documents that serve as the interfaces to e-business applications and web-based services. It is natural to conceptualize the business relationships between companies as document exchanges, and XML, with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for electronic documents, has rapidly emerged as a key enabling technology as e-business takes hold on the Internet. After introducing XML syntax, styles and transformations, and schema languages, a substantial part of the course is devoted to teaching students practical skills for designing and implementing the documents that enable e-business transactions and applications. These skills include: developing information requirements, analyzing existing documents, identifying and organizing document components, implementing XML schemas, modeling business processes, specifying business processes and service interfaces using XML schemas, and'choreographing' complex chains of document exchanges for multi-company business activities.

The course also introduces and evaluates the relevant XML standards, specifications, and software architectures for the design, development, and deployment of document-centric e-business applications, e-marketplaces, and web services. It explains the co-evolution of document-centric e-business models and their enabling architectures and computational environments (it has been said that 'XML gives Java something to do'). It interleaves technology issues with management and business concerns, such as selecting a standards strategy, assessing an organization's readiness for document engineering, and meeting the legal, policy, and interoperability challenges within and between electronic trading communities.

About the Instructor

Bob Glushko is an Engineering Fellow at Commerce One, which provides software and services for electronic marketplaces. Before becoming an Engineering Fellow in November 2000, Glushko was Director, Document Engineering and Director, Advanced Technology, responsible for Commerce One's XML architecture and technical standards efforts. He joined Commerce One in January 1999 when it acquired Veo Systems, which pioneered the use of XML for e-commerce and which he co-founded in 1997. Prior to Veo Systems, Glushko co-founded two companies specializing in SGML-based electronic publishing. He has worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories and the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University. He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford, an MS (Software Engineering) from the Wang Institute, and a Ph.D. (cognitive psychology) from UC San Diego.