A novel approach for business document representation and processing without semantic ambiguity in e-commerce

Exact document interpretation is very important to semantic document exchange. An essential issue for document interpretation is to maintain syntactic and semantic consistency of the exchanged documents between any two autonomous business communities, where the document sender and receiver have no misunderstanding in using the exchanged documents. Existing approaches to resolving this issue mainly adopt document standards. While these approaches are effective in certain degree, the issue of limited flexibility and evolvement in using standards must be explored and resolved. This paper proposes a multi-viewed tabular document (Tabdoc) approach consisting of a Tabdoc model and a document processing procedure to achieving consistent document interpretation between document writers and readers. In this approach, any document is a table, which is seen as a tree to represent document structure. Concepts, layout and grammatical relations of a same document are separated from the document structure and form different views in Tabdoc model.