THE FUNCTION OF DOCUMENTS

The purpose of a document is to facilitate the transfer of information from its author to its readers. It is the author's job to design the document so that the information it contains can be interpreted accura tely and efficiently. To do this, the author can make use of a set of stylistic tools. In this paper, we introduce the concept of document f unctionality, which attempts to describe the roles of documents and th eir components in the process of transferring information. A functiona l description of a document provides insight into the type of the docu ment, into its intended uses, and into strategies for automatic docume nt interpretation and retrieval. To demonstrate these ideas, we define a taxonomy of functional document components and show how functional descriptions can be used to reverse-engineer the intentions of the aut hor, to navigate in document space, and to provide important contextua l information to aid in interpretation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.