No abstract

In an information system, if data-entry agents (authors) do not understand properly the intentions of the designer of the structure they are populating (the modeler), they can make errors, resulting in incomplete or incorrect information entering the system. Thus, modeler-author communication is of prime importance in the performance of a system. Intertextual Semantics (IS) is a semantic framework for structured-document, based on natural language, intended to facilitate the communication of the modeler's intentions to interface designers and authors. In IS, the modeler prepares "peritexts" ("text-before" and "text-after" segments) in natural language, that help understanding the contents of an element (or field) by putting it in the appropriate context. The experience reported here is the application of IS to the development of an exchange format between funeral homes and cemeteries. The issues raised by the use of this approach are discussed.

We report on a project consisting in the application of the Intertextual Semantics modeling method (IS; Marcoux 2006, Marcoux & Rizkallah 2007a, Marcoux & Rizkallah 2009) to a particular type of legal document: the “Agreement as to the conduct of the proceedings,” used in the Province de Québec (Canada). This was done as a sub-project of the Towards Cyberjustice project in the Faculty of Law at Université de Montréal. One of the project objectives was to verify whether the availability of a semantic model of a document type (more precisely, a IS model) would impact on (and hopefully help) the development of an application for the collaborative authoring of such documents. We first explain how the project lead to many extensions to the then existing rudimentary IS platform (Marcoux 2009), and describe the most important of them. We then present a few unforeseen difficulties that arose in the process of modeling, and the lessons learned. Although no definite answer was obtained as to whether IS can directly help in the development of applications, the project showed it can at least help indirectly, by forcing fundamental questions to be asked early on in the process. In our case, applying IS modeling revealed that nobody really knew from the outset what the target community was, nor what their actual needs were. This is a good illustration of the kind of effect IS can have on application development projects: making sure fundamental questions do not go unasked too long.

No abstract

We establish a necessary and sufficient condition for a graph to correspond to the structure of an overlapping markup document, such as a well-formed TexMECS document (not using interrupted or virtual elements). This provides a test for determining if any given graph can be serialized into a TexMECS document—or any other similar language—using only overlapping markup. Such a test may prove useful in DOM-based applications, to determine if an attempted modification operation would preserve the overlap-only serializability of the document. For example, in a document editor using a graph-oriented interface, the user could be warned when a requested operation would prevent the document from being serializable with overlapping elements only. To our knowledge, no such characterization has been given before.