Abstract
Documents are fundamental in our lives because they are the means to convey information and/or the formal evidence of something. Although they date back to the first times of human civilization, the current technological development has turned upside-down many classical aspects of document creation, management, processing and exploitation. In particular, the advent of computer systems has made much easier document production and transmission, which is an opportunity but also a source of problems. A problem is how to turn into a computer-suitable form all existing documents; another is the introduction of digital documents, as a replacement of legacy ones, in the well-established bureaucratic mechanisms that rule our society since several millennia. This is not easy, due to the many different kinds of documents at hand, and to the different perspectives and needs of the institutions interested in document management and of their users. Here, after reviewing various perspectives on documents and providing a historical survey of their evolution, various categories of documents are identified, and a particular focus on digital ones is given.
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Notes
- 1.
Francesco Carnelutti (1879–1965), a famous lawyer and jurist, main inspirer for the 1942 version of the Italian Civil Law.
- 2.
Usually, the three terms denote different but strictly related concepts: data are just values; they become information when an interpretation is given to them, while knowledge refers to pieces of information that are inter-related both among themselves and with other experience.
- 3.
Another term sometimes exploited to convey the same meaning is physical. However, it is a bit odd because even intangible supports require a physical implementation to be perceived, e.g., air is the physical support of the intangible ‘sound’ documents, and magnetic polarization or electrical signals are the physical support of the intangible ‘digital’ documents.
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Ferilli, S. (2011). Documents. In: Automatic Digital Document Processing and Management. Advances in Pattern Recognition. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-198-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-198-1_1
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