Agent-Based Document Control for Large Projects

This paper describes how embedded knowledge can be used to convert design data into intelligent software agents. This allows documents to sense their environment and respond to it based on a localized set of data and knowledge. As a result, this approach allows document-specific customization of applications that operate on these documents. While this approach has a wide range of possible applications, this paper highlights the benefits of this approach to the task of Document Control. Specifically, this paper describes a new approach that uses embedded knowledge to provide document-side functionality to support document tracking and interactions with a Document Control server. The approach addresses the issues of detecting new versions of a document, passing knowledge to these versions, and allowing these versions to communicate with other documents. In addition, this paper describes a sample implementation that will highlight the benefits of the proposed approach.