SGML in healthcare information systems

Introducing SGML to a conservative publishing house is a long way to go. In the case of C. H. Beck, the leading company for legal publications in Germany, the efforts were driven by the demands of a continuous growing market for electronic publications, on line as well as CD-ROM. Since information is the main business of a publishing company, to create an effective information repository was the first step to go. The efforts were driven into two different directions. On one hand the information, the sources and the publication process was structured in classic entity relationship models. The analysis brought three different information models (legislative documents, court decisions and intellectually authored texts) implicating three different databases. Two of three databases represent an entity relationship model of the information. The third database (storing the authored texts like books) is document driven and mirrors the structure of the source publication. To enable the best flexibility and an easy handling of the data, in each case the documents were broken apart into micro documents of almost the same class. On the other hand the source documents and the resulting publications where examined in order to create a DTD. The resulting DTD is divided into several modules, that represent overall document structures (books, journals, sections etc.) and modules to indicate detailed information (tables, highlighting etc.). the overall DTD is intended as an abstract model in order to derive various different process specific DTDs. Thus the derailed element model corresponds with the micro documents of the information repository. The global document structures are created by the export function of the databases. In the future there will be a combining project management system, which will enable the product manager to create publications containing micro documents of all three databases and an overall structure.