A Descriptive Language for Information Object Reuse through Virtual Documents

The importance of reuse is well recognised for electronic document writing. 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. In this paper, we present a language for information reuse that allows users to write virtual documents, where dynamic information objects can be retrieved from various sources, transformed, and included along with static information in SGML documents. The language uses a tree-like structure for the representation of information objects, and allows querying without a complete knowledge of the structure or the types of information. The data structures and the syntax of the language are presented through an example application. A major strength of our approach is to treat the document as a non-monolithic set of reusable information objects.