Conception des chaînes éditoriales

This thesis deals with the design of digital XML publishing chains : document production software which allows writing fragments and composing them in order to publish documents. Document publication is computed by transforming XML fragments into digital documents in standard formats. The composition of the fragments allows the repurposing of existing contents into new documents.

The writing of repurposed documents involves a change in the logical representation of documents from the classical form of the tree to a graph of linked fragments. This work is dedicated to the limitations encountered when the complexity of the graph becomes an obstacle to the writing of consistent documents.

We developed a theory for the design of publishing chains which is based on two complementary approaches around the concept of the writing workspace - the space where the authors write the fragments - to assist writers in the editing of complex graphs.

The first approach is internal to the workspace. We propose to model pragmatic fragments intended to assist authors in fragment management while recording graph activity. These fragments are involved in the activity documentarisation since they produce and maintain a documentation of the actions performed on the graph.

The second approach is external to the workspace. We propose to structure the graph as several workspaces based on publishing and authorial projects. The challenge is to distribute the graph over several workspaces in order to simplify their perception and handling.

We participated in the development of Scenari in order to experiment our theoretical approach. The pragmatic fragment models of the task, of the commented fragment, and of the responsibilities and life cycles on fragments were developed to document the activity. The layer workspaces and proxy fragments were designed to structure the graph.

Our experiments allowed us to summarize a methodology for designing publishing chains which handle complex graphs. Our work is concluded with an epistemological approach in order to qualify and evaluate this technological research.

Document engineering, publishing chain, repurposing, graph, complexity, modeling