An Ontology-Driven Approach to Electronic Document Structure Design

Abstract

Over the course of history, humankind used documents as one of the ways of organization of the data. In the recent decades, electronic documentation became increasingly widespread. To make electronic documents exchange possible, standards regulating transmission protocols, representation formats, and rules for document building are necessary. For some protocols (HTTP, SOAP, etc.) and formats (EDI, XML, JSON, etc.), relatively fixed and generally accepted standards are available. As for the electronic document design, there is an abundance of approaches where a leader could hardly be established; all of them have their benefits and drawbacks. This study explores some of these approaches (UN/CEFACT CCTS, WCO DM, ISO 20022, and NIEM). These approaches have different features but from the conceptual perspective they are intended to describe sets of details of some real-world objects. The paper proposes to describe such objects using an ontology and then, based on this ontology, build conceptual structures of electronic documents that can be converted to platform-independent structures of electronic documents in accordance with one of the standards. The introduced approach allows harmonizing the standards under consideration.