Dr. Robert J. Glushko
School of Information Management & Systems
Spring 2002: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:30-5 pm
E-Mail: glushko@sims.berkeley.edu
Office: 2 South Hall; Phone: (510) 643-2754
Office Hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30-10:30 am
This three-unit course introduces a new discipline of "Document Engineering" for specifying, designing, and deploying the electronic documents that serve as the interfaces to e-business applications and web-based services. It is natural to conceptualize the business relationships between companies as document exchanges, and XML, with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for electronic documents, has rapidly emerged as a key enabling technology as e-business takes hold on the Internet. After introducing XML syntax, styles and transformations, and schema languages, a substantial part of the course is devoted to teaching students practical skills for designing and implementing the documents that enable e-business transactions and applications. These skills include: developing information requirements, analyzing existing documents, identifying and organizing document components, implementing XML schemas, modeling business processes, specifying business processes and service interfaces using XML schemas, and "choreographing" complex chains of document exchanges for multi-company business activities.
The course also introduces and evaluates the relevant XML standards, specifications, and software architectures for the design, development, and deployment of document-centric e-business applications, e-marketplaces, and web services. It explains the co-evolution of document-centric e-business models and their enabling architectures and computational environments (it has been said that "XML gives Java something to do"). It interleaves technology issues with management and business concerns, such as selecting a standards strategy, assessing an organization's readiness for document engineering, and meeting the legal, policy, and interoperability challenges within and between electronic trading communities.
Grades will be based on classroom participation and on six take-home assignments, some of which will be completed by teams of students. There is no final exam or course project because it is expected that for many SIMS students the skills developed in this course will be heavily exploited in the SIMS final project.