Comprehensive document representation

Documents today have an increasing variety of uses, and because of the involvement of computers in both production and analysis, may be encountered in many forms. To meet these application and accessibility demands, we propose a representation formalism based on a five-dimensional space: physical, logical, functional, and topical organization, as well as document class. The suggested implementation is a semantic net with inheritance with the region as the primitive element and relations for specialization, aggregation, continuity, and topicality.