Document-oriented Development of Content-intensive Applications

In this paper we promote a document-oriented approach to the development of contentintensive applications (i.e., applications that critically depend on the informational contents and on the characterization of the contents’ structure). This approach is the result of our experience as developers in the educational and in the hypermedia domains, as well as in the domain of knowledge-based systems. The main reason for choosing the document-oriented approach is to make it easier for domain experts to comprehend the elements that represent the main application’s features. Among these elements are: the application’s contents, the application’s customizable properties including those of its interface, and the structure of all this information. Therefore, in our approach, these features are represented by means of a set of application documents, which are marked up using a suitable descriptive Domain-Specific Markup Language (DSML). If this goal is fully accomplished, the application itself can be automatically produced by processing those documents with a suitable processor for the DSML defined. The document-oriented development enhances the production and maintenance of content-intensive applications, because the applications’ features are described in the form of human-readable and editable documents, understandable by domain experts and suitable for automatic processing. Nevertheless, the main drawbacks of the approach are the planning overload of the whole production process and the costs of the provision and maintenance of the DSMLs and their processors. These drawbacks can be palliated by adopting an incremental strategy for the production and maintenance of the applications and also for the definition and the operationalization of the DSMLs.