The Digital Document

Documents, such as drawings, memos and specifications, form an essential function in the design and construction industry. Throughout the lifecycle of a built asset, starting from an initial design idea, right through to a final built form and its ongoing management, thousands, even millions of documents can be used to convey various forms of information to a range of interested parties. In many ways, therefore, the success of a design, or construction-based company, relies upon an understanding of the use of documents, as well as the technologies and techniques that are used to create them. The Digital Document provides an extensive background to the issues and technologies surrounding this very important topic. It examines a technical subject in an insightful manner that is neither intimidating nor confusing, even to the novice computer user. By introducing the subject through a series of preliminary reviews of current practices and essential computing technologies, the reader is able to better appreciate the benefits and capabilities of a wide range of digital document types. This book explores the role of documents in a professional practice, examines the components, capabilities, viability, and use of digital documents in the design and construction industry, and identifies and explains many of the standards in use today. In order to facilitate a better understanding of digital document technologies, a number of essential reviews are provided including: - the definition and purpose of a document - how documents are typically used by design professionals - the nature of the digital document environment - the data types which make up digital documents The Digital Document is an essential reference for the architect, engineer or design professional that wants to find out more about effective communication in the digital workplace. Bruce Duyshart is an IT Project Manager with Lend Lease Corporation and specialises in the development and implementation of digital media and information management technologies on design and construction projects. He holds a Masters degree in Architecture and is also an academic associate of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. He has written numerous papers on emerging technologies in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, and has developed Internet web sites for the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and Architecture Media.

One possible solution to the increased amount of paper generated by mankind over recent years is to use the computer and its associated possibility of storing digital information. Through digitisation, the image of a paper can be stored in a digital file. With the development of new storage mediums with even larger capacity and faster access times, it is possible to put a complete collection of books in a single DVD or a small flash drive. This brought forth a possible solution to the problem of carrying and copying the information. But as new opportunities appear to us, we create new possibilities and new problems with them. In this way, carrying and copying moved away from being the centre of the problem. This book covers the main aspects of document analysis and processing, including digitisation, storage, thresholding, filtering, segmentation and automatic recognition.

This volume contains the proceedings of two recent conferences in the ?eld of electronic publishing and digital documents: – DDEP 2000, the 8th International Conference on Digital Documents and Electronic Publishing, the successor conference to the EP conference series; and – PODDP 2000, the 5th International Workshop on the Principles of Digital Document Processing. Both conferences were held at the Technische Universit ̈ at Munc ̈ hen, Munich, Germany in September 2000. DDEP 2000 was the eighth in a biennial series of international conferences organized to promote the exchange of novel ideas concerning the computer p- duction, manipulation and dissemination of documents. This conference series has attempted to re?ect the evolving nature and usage of documents by treating digital documents and electronic publishing as a broad topic covering many - pects. These aspects have included document models, document representation and document dissemination, dynamic and hyper-documents, document ana- sis and management, and wide-ranging applications. The papers presented at DDEP 2000 and in this volume re?ect this broad view, and cover such diverse topicsashypermediastructureanddesign,multimediaauthoringtechniquesand systems, document structure inference, typography, document management and adaptation, document collections and Petri nets. All papers were refereed by an international program committee.

This text reviews the issues involved in handling and processing digital documents. Examining the full range of a document’s lifetime, the book covers acquisition, representation, security, pre-processing, layout analysis, understanding, analysis of single components, information extraction, filing, indexing and retrieval. Features: provides a list of acronyms and a glossary of technical terms; contains appendices covering key concepts in machine learning, and providing a case study on building an intelligent system for digital document and library management; discusses issues of security, and legal aspects of digital documents; examines core issues of document image analysis, and image processing techniques of particular relevance to digitized documents; reviews the resources available for natural language processing, in addition to techniques of linguistic analysis for content handling; investigates methods for extracting and retrieving data/information from a document.

Crypto '90 marked the tenth anniversary of the Crypto conferences held at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The conference was held from August 11 to August 15, 1990 and was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the Department of Computer Science of the University of California at Santa Barbara. 227 participants from twenty countries around the world. Crypto '90 attracted Roughly 35% of attendees were from academia, 45% from industry and 20% from government. The program was intended to provide a balance between the purely theoretical and the purely practical aspects of cryptography to meet the needs and diversified interests of these various groups. The overall organization of the conference was superbly handled by the general chairperson Sherry McMahan. All of the outstanding features of Crypto, which we have come to expect over the years, were again present and, in addition to all of this, she did a magnificent job in the preparation of the book of abstracts. This is a crucial part of the program and we owe her a great deal of thanks.

This book brings all the major and frontier topics in the field of document analysis together into a single volume, creating a unique reference source that will be invaluable to a large audience of researchers, lecturers and students working in this field. With chapters written by some of the most distinguished researchers active in this field, this book addresses recent advances in digital document processing research and development.