An approach for document fragment retrieval and its formatting issue in engineering information management

Abstract

This paper discusses engineering document fragment mark-up supported by the use of the eXstensible Stylesheet Language - Formatting Objects (XLS-FO). XLS-FO can be used to convert the native format representation of such documents as Word, Excel and PDF into XML. Once in XML, documents fragments can be retrieved at will in response to a search query. In the paper the process of a document fragment retrieval - based on the authors' decomposition scheme approach - has been modelled and the issue of converting documents into XML addressed. Additionally, the use of document templates is discussed as a means of ensuring that the transformed XML documents are compliant with the decomposition schemes. Automating the reformatting of documents into XML and the use of templates helps make implementation of a document-fragment approach to retrieval more resource efficient, so making its adoption in industry more practicable. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.