A tool for semi-automatic document reengineering

Marking-up of documents that only contain a layout-oriented structure (e.g. documents created by an ordinary word-processor) becomes more and more important for the future of information management in modern companies. That's because only after the document has been marked up with logical elements, those additional information can be used for example to implement single-source publishing or to enable content-oriented retrieval. Today the process of marking-up layout-oriented documents usually has to be done manually what leads to high costs for the companies. In the project "Adaptive READ" the Institute for Human Factors and Technology Management (IAT) of the University of Stuttgart has developed a semi-automatic approach to solve this problem of marking-up documents that only contain a layout-oriented structure. The main issues of this development are discussed in the following article.