Enhancing object-oriented modeling with concepts to integrate electronic documents

This paper presents an approach that fosters a seamless integration of documents with corporate information systems. It is based on a conceptually enhanced notion of documents that promises more meaningful ways of processing documents and increased system integrity as well. The approach resulted from enhancing an existing methodology for designing object-oriented enterprise models as well as a design environment that is based on it. It suggests to widely abstract from current appearances of documents. Instead it recommends to begin with focusing on business processes. Analyzing the information required within a business process results in a preliminary object model. Various templates and checklists will then guide the analyst with identifying document candidates within the object model and specifying their semantics - also taking into account requirements that may result from providing transformations into standardized document representations such as SGML, HTML, EDIFACT, etc.