Enterprise Documentation: A Formal-Model Approach

Abstract

Most digital documents within an enterprise reside outside traditional databases. Search engines have been used to retrieve these digital documents but the results are often unsatisfactory. Digital libraries yield search results with greater precision than general search engines and are capable of compartmentalizing a wide variety of digital documents. However, digital libraries cannot subtly control application-specific document retrievals because they lack a formal model for recognizing the intrinsic relationships among digital documents. This research proposes a formal model, the Entity-Oriented Enterprise Documentation Model (EOEDM), to facilitate document retrievals for enterprise applications. This EOEDM is a meta-level modeling schema, exploiting the entity-relationship model in database design as well as the object model in application design. Since enterprise documents usually result from business activities, the proposed model targets the enterprise documentation needs and relies on the patterns of business activities to associate and locate digital documents with higher precision and better recall.