B.N. Rossiter
K.G. Huntley
M.A. Heather
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1994
Active documents have dynamical prescriptive and inferential properties. Electronic publishing has greater functionality for achieving these because there are some difficulties which arise when the physical reality of documents is not available. For consistent operations, a systems analysis of the activity is needed with representations like entity-life histories. Careful attention has to be paid to the choice of a platform language which needs to be strong on behavioural characteristics. Active documents play a key role in legal transactions and the law is an important customer of electronic publishing. As an illustration, a fully-worked example is therefore given of an implementation for a bill of lading which has been designed at Newcastle using an object-oriented graphical approach.