Declarative development of Web applications with active documents

A document implies intention of its own designer, which can be utilized actively in the automation of business processes. With the understanding of document form and function, we can regard documents as executable computer programs in a special case. For this approach, an active document model is proposed, which is composed of document form, data, rules, and queries. These components reflect the form as well as the function of documents orthogonally. In this model, documents can interact with machines and can cooperate with other applications. The model establishes a framework of accelerating the development of intelligent document-centric applications. Moreover, it shows in advance what will become of documents of the semantic Web. To be concrete, a prototype development system for declarative Web applications based on the active documents is designed and implemented.