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Deriving document workflows from feature models

Abstract:

Despite the increasing interest in the Document Engineering community, a formal definition of document workflow is still to come. Often, the term refers to an abstract process consisting in a set of tasks to contribute to some document contents, and some techniques are being developed to support parts of these tasks rather than how to generate the process itself. In most proposals, these tasks are implicit in the business processes running in an organization, lacking an explicit document workflow model that could be analysed and enacted as a coherent unit. In this paper, we propose a document-centric approach to document workflow generation. We have extended the feature-based document metamodel of the Document Product Lines approach with an organizational metamodel. For a given configuration of the feature model, we assign tasks to different members of the organization to contribute to the document contents. Moreover, the relationships between features define an ordering of the tasks, which may be refined to produce a specification of the document workflow model automatically. The generation of customized software manuals is used to illustrate the proposal. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).