Towards a methodology for document analysis

A great deal of the collective knowledge of organizations is stored in documents. To be able to use documents effectively, the information structure in the documents should be carefully planned. International standards, for example SGML, have been developed for defining document structures. The definition method however is not enough. For defining effective document standards for an organization, a profound document analysis is needed. In the analysis, current documents and document management practices should be studied and described before developing new document structures and document management practices. The development of a methodology for document analysis is going on in a project studying legislative documents produced in the Finnish government and parliament. The article describes the first results of the project. As the document structure definition method, SGML is used in the project. The analysis method is developed and extended from an object‐oriented method. The article introduces the main phases of the analysis: Domain definition, object modeling, state modeling, and content modeling. The application of the methodology in the case project and the data gathering methods used are also described. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.