A Model-Driven Architecture for Enterprise Document Management, Supporting Discovery and Reuse

Abstract

The work described in this thesis investigates the application of enterprise document management techniques to better support documents discovery and reuse across a learning organisation. It examines the nature of documents and organisations, and the roles that documentation plays within modern enterprises. This thesis recognises the increasing need to reuse documents at a number of levels of abstraction, so leveraging an enterprise's valuable document resources. Enabled by Internet developments and document mark-up languages, particularly the extensible mark-up language (XML) and its associated standards, this thesis describes the development of ideas that have led to the design and initial implementation of the Model-driven Reuse Architecture MRA The concept underlying the design of the MRA have developed from an initial feasibility study undertaken with the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD) to provide management techniques for military support documentation. A range of current approaches to document management and enterprise-wide information model based approach to document management permits access to and reuse of document fragments for new purposes. An extensible mechanism permits the inclusion of other document approaches to facilitate document discovery, potentially lead into reuse. This thesis describes the approach taken undersigning a new document architecture that provides a work-focussed approach to document management encouraging social collaboration rather than automation, and supporting a range of users within the same environment. This thesis presents the overall Model-driven Reuse Architecture and preliminary implementation that has been developed to support the specific needs of teaching and learning in higher education. The resulting web-base implementation, MRA-HE, is evaluated in terms of how it performs against a set of realistic scenarios within the domain of higher education. Upon evaluating the MRA-HE implementation, the final chapter of this thesis generalises some of the MRA approaches to the diverse demands of other types of organisation