i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

September 20, 2010

Many information-intensive processes and applications involve both "documents" and "data" that are often transformationally related; consider, for example, the close relationship between tax forms and the instructions for filling them out, or between product brochures and purchase orders.  But many people have contrasted "documents" and "data" and concluded that documents and data cannot be understood and handled with the same terminology, techniques, and tools.  I argue that there is no clear boundary between documents and data because there is systematic and continuous variation in document types and instances from the "narrative" end to the "transactional" end of the Document Type Spectrum.   This view leads to a more abstract and more broadly applicable conception of information modeling that emphasizes what document and data modeling have in common rather than how they differ.