Document's life cycle

Another example of management information that describes a document and not its contents is a document's life cycle. The life cycle of a document encompasses a set of events that make the document evolve. In order to describe a step in the life of the document, we generally gather the following information:

the related event - either a request or an action;
the author of the event - either a tool or a user;
the result associated with the execution of the event - in general the result is initialized, in progress, successful, failed, etc;
the explanation of the obtained result - this explanation can be produced by a tool if it is a tool that handles the event, or by a user if it is an operator who transmits the event.

The goal is to display all the transformations that a document has undergone. The sole availability of this information can be helpful to the user in his work. The appearance of information resembles database information very closely. Chronology and changes to state are the most pertinent. The availability of this information is of real value to standalone users. It allows operators to be more autonomous and better informed in their decision making. Its localization, within the document or outside, is of little importance in the end. In this case, the information can be stored within a concurrent document, within a sub-document, or within another document.

[Next Section] [Previous Section]

Using Management Information Within an Editorial Context

Document's life cycle