What is Wrong with Digital Documents? A Conceptual Model for Structural Cross-Media Content Composition and Reuse
Many of today’s digital document formats are strongly based on a digital emulation of printed media. While such a paper simulation might be appropriate for the visualisation of certain digital content, it is generally not the most effective solution for digitally managing and storing information. The oversimplistic modelling of digital documents as monolithic blocks of linear content, with a lack of structural semantics, does not pay attention to some of the superior features that digital media offers in comparison to traditional paper documents. For example, existing digital document formats adopt the limitations of paper documents by unnecessarily replicating content via copy and paste operations, instead of digitally embedding and reusing parts of digital documents via structural references. We introduce a conceptual model for structural cross-media content composition and highlight how the proposed solution not only enables the reuse of content via structural relationships, but also supports dynamic and context-dependent document adaptation, structural content annotations as well as the integration of arbitrary non-textual media types. We further discuss solutions for the fluid navigation and cross-media content publishing based on the proposed structural cross-media content model.
Publication Reference
Signer, B.: "What is Wrong with Digital Documents? A Conceptual Model for Structural Cross-Media Content Composition and Reuse", Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2010), Vancouver, Canada, November 2010
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