Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Tim McGrath (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Document Engineering provides a thorough, common-sense approach to designing the documents used in service-oriented architectures. Well written and packed with examples, it is timely reading for architects, developers, and managers."
—Ronald Bourret, author of XML and Databases

"This manifesto for the document engineering revolution gives you the what, the why, and the how of automating your business processes with XML, leading to greater cost savings, higher quality, and more flexibility."
—Hal Varian, Haas School of Business and Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

"Today, information technology is evolving so rapidly that the industry struggles to keep pace. This book explains the core concepts facing IT workers with respect to engineering data at both the atomic and aggregate (document) levels. It also tackles interoperability and multiple expressions of data at the meta and instance levels. This book will become the bible for document and data model engineering and should be required reading for all current IT workers—period!"
—Duane Allan Nickull, Vice Chair, United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, and Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems

Product Description

Much of the business transacted on the Web today takes place through information exchanges made possible by using documents as interfaces. For example, what seems to be a simple purchase from an online bookstore actually involves at least three different business collaborations—between the customer and the online catalog to select a book; between the bookstore and a credit card authorization service to verify and charge the customer's account; and between the bookstore and the delivery service with instructions for picking up and delivering the book to the customer. Document engineering is needed to analyze, design, and implement these Internet information exchanges. This book is an introduction to the emerging field of document engineering.

The authors, both leaders in the development of document engineering and other e-commerce initiatives, analyze document exchanges from a variety of perspectives. Taking a qualitative view, they look at patterns of document exchanges as components of business models; looking at documents in more detail, they describe techniques for analyzing individual transaction patterns and the role they play in the overall business process. They describe techniques for analyzing, designing, and encoding document models, including XML, and discuss the techniques and architectures that make XML a unifying technology for the next generation of e-business applications. Finally, they go beyond document models to consider management and strategic issues—the business model, or the vision, that the information exchanged in these documents serves.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 728 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (August 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262072610
• ISBN-13: 978-0262072618
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #835,220 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Roadmap for How To Upgrade All Businesses to the Internet Era, December 27, 2005

By	D. Sunderhaft (cleveland, oh) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

At the end of the day, business success comes down to three things: a product, the market, and the business processes. The business processes consist of people, tools and workflow. You can have a great product in a great market but if you have bad business processes...you can forget about it. Many organizations have tried to implement Six Sigma to ensure highly effective business processes. The key to six sigma is data. Data tells you how effective your processes are. For example, data will tell you things like: how many parts per million are defective, how many invoices per million were inaccurate, how many orders shipped late, how long it takes to execute an order once a contract is signed, how long a customer support rep spent on the phone, etc......Once you have the data, evaluating the problem and recommeding a solution is easy. The hard part however is getting the data. You can either collect the data manually over time or if you have the infrastructure you can collect it electronically through software. Unfortunately if you have to collect the data manually, it takes a long time, effort and money. If you collect data electronically it enables no additional time and provides real time visibility and the ability to implement positive changes on the fly. So how do you go from a manual data collection process to an automated data collection process? That's what this book, Document Engineering, will help you figure out. I have owned this book for about 2 months and it has been on my desk since. I continuously refer to it for insights on how to develop a clear plan on how to implement a data collection infrastructure that will help to more effectively manage business processes.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very relevant for anyone designing Web Services, August 4, 2006

By	Zahid N. Ahmed "Zahid Ahmed" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Component modeling, analysis of information exchanges, and
application services usage patterns are critical areas to focus
on in designing internal and external interfaces exposed by
enterprises, ASPs/SaaS, and other consumer-oriented internet
services. We have many good examples of scalable, evolvable,
easy to integrate and interoperable Web Services API in the
consumer-oriented internet industry currently. The areas
covered in the DOCUMENT ENGINEERING is very relevant to
architects, product managers, developers and technology
executives. I especially found the design patterns and process
discussion helpful. I would recommend this book to anyone
interested in services oriented application platforms, internal
and external enterprise integration to employ in the design
phase since it covers an effective methodology of designing
interfaces based on the document-centric component model.

Zahid Ahmed
San Jose, CA

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars explains well SOA, Web Services and semantics , June 20, 2006

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The book is a refreshingly understandable approach to explaining Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services and the Semantic Web. Other texts often drown the reader in hugely verbose XML examples. But here, the authors achieve clarity in discussing the essence of the above concepts. The XML snippets are clear, without being overly long.

You can also see why interoperability issues might inevitably arise in a loosely coupled Web Services environment. Often due to differing semantic meanings attached to the same fields in a common document structure. The book touches upon hard problems of ontologies and how the different meanings might be accomodated in a realistic deployment of distributed Web Services.