A Virtual Document Interpreter for Reuse pf Information

The importance of reuse of information is well recognised for electronic publishing. However, it is rarely achieved satisfactorily because of the complexity of the task: integrating different formats, handling updates of information, addressing document author’s need for intuitiveness and simplicity, etc. An approach which addresses these problems is to dynamically generate and update documents through a descriptive definition of virtual documents. In this paper we present a document interpreter that allows gathering information from multiple sources, and combining it dynamically to produce a virtual document. Two strengths of our approach are: the generic information objects that we use, which enables access to distributed, heterogeneous data sources; and the interpreter’s evaluation strategy, which permits a minimum of re-evaluation of the information objects from the data sources.