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Documents hold a considerable amount of information that is mainly interpreted by humans. One disadvantage of using documents is the difficulty of obtaining consolidated information from them, especially when information is spread in several documents. Accessing, recovering and managing information recorded in documents usually depend on human intervention and can be laborious and error-prone. Besides, gathering relevant information from different documents can be so wearing that people may tend not to do that.

Semantic Documentation combines documents and ontologies in the same way that Semantic Web, i.e., ontology-based metadata are created and then attached to the document content, resulting in a semantic document. By doing that, syntactic information resources are turned into semantic information resources, which can be interpreted by computers.

In the semantic annotation process for generating a semantic document, the person responsible for adding metadata to documents uses a supporting tool to semantically enrich the document. For each annotation, the tool creates semantic metadata relating a fragment of the document (referring to general information or document content)to an element of the ontology. Usually, metadata are kept in the semantic document.  Once documents are annotated, it is possible to extract knowledge and link contents from different documents according to the shared ontology. By integrating content extracted from several documents, it is possible to achieve a more holistic view of the available knowledge.

The Infrastructure for Managing Semantic Documents (IMSD) is an environment developed to support the management of desktop semantic documents (text documents and spreadsheets), allowing semantic annotation of document templates (semantic templates). Thus, documents produced by using the annotated templates are automatically annotated, easing end users work, since they can use the annotated templates to create semantic documents without concern with the annotations to be made. The semantic documents created by using the semantic templates are stored in a semantic document repository. Data are extracted from the semantic documents and stored in a data repository which provides data to functionalities that answer searches and queries and produce consolidated information for users.

Information about the  Infrastructure for Managing Semantic Documents (IMSD) can be found in:

  • ARANTES, L.O.; FALBO, R.A.. An Infrastructure for Managing Semantic Documents. In: Joint 5th International Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for the Enterprise (VORTE) & International Workshop on Metamodels, Ontologies and Semantic Technologies (MOST), 2010.

Report on the use of IMSD to support Requirements Engineering:

Publications about the use of IMSD to support Project Management: