Creation, Management and Publication of Digital Documents using Standard Components on the Internet

Today, digital documents play a steadily increasing role within our society. The Internet as well as the World Wide Web, offering the opportunity for easy and efficient distributed collaboration, additionally speed up this process. It is therefore as much promising as necessary to develop, to implement and to evaluate new systems to support workflows based on digital documents and Web technology. However, it is important not only to replace traditional (e.g. paper-based) workflows with their electronic counterpart, but also to improve them by exploiting the new possibilities. In this thesis, following an introduction to the field of digital documents and digital libraries, three consecutive application scenarios about the successful application of digital workflows will be presented. First, the research project GoldenGate focuses on the creation of and the access to structured documents. Then, the project EG Online is discussed as an example scenario for information and distributed collaboration with the help of Web Services. Finally, the results from the research project Managing Conference Proceedings are presented, which implements a complete electronic creation, managing and publication workflow based on digital documents, using ideas and techniques developed during the previous two projects. All these projects have led to new systems and procedures which were and still are used successfully in different environments. For example EG Online is the central tool in the daily work of the Eurographics Association and several large scientific conferences as well as workshops are supported by the MCP system every year. The presentation and the discussion of the achieved results and of the experiences gained form a major part of this work.