Electronic Interactive Documents and Knowledge Enhancing. A Semiotic Approach

Documents act as a medium to permanently record and communicate concepts, thoughts, procedures and data. Traditional documents of our interest consist of a physical support modified by some physical action performed by an author. Examples are written papers, engraved stones etc. Traditional documentation techniques result from a long evolution: professional communities developed and shaped customized documentation styles, notations and annotation procedures to better express and record their specific knowledge on a permanent physical media. Electronic documents (e-documents) appear as a new media, which evolve, and complement the traditional documents in recording, annotating and making available to a community of practice knowledge but also opens new ways of constructing and enhancing it . Both traditional and electronic documents can be seen as set of symbols, a message, exchanged among communicants using a language as tool for composing these symbols. However traditional documents and e-documents have different nature. We investigate the digital communication process and the interplay among communicants, symbols and world of phenomena assuming a semiotic approach: in particular, we present a computer semiotic approach [1][2][3] to describe the digital communication process and the new characteristics that the creation and the maintenance of e-documents and the interaction with them present. The Web strengthens the knowledge sharing and enhancing, supporting a two-way and interactive exchange of ideas through electronic documents [4]. E-documents allow an evolution of the role of author/user and open the possibility of the new ways of accumulation, enhancement, access and distribution of knowledge. Electronic annotation is the tool supporting this evolution. The paper is organized as following: section 2 introduces our semiotic view on the digital interaction process; in section 3 we discuss a redefinition of document in the digital world; section 4 completes the view on digital communication process and shows how the characteristics of edocuments can help to enhance knowledge. E-annotation is presented as a tool to exchange and accumulate knowledge in section 5. Section 6 concludes the paper.