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Despite the increasing interest in the Document Engineering community, a formal definition of document workflow is still to come. Often, the term refers to an abstract process consisting in a set of tasks to contribute to some document contents, and some techniques are being developed to support parts of these tasks rather than how to generate the process itself. In most proposals, these tasks are implicit in the business processes running in an organization, lacking an explicit document workflow model that could be analysed and enacted as a coherent unit. In this paper, we propose a document-centric approach to document workflow generation. We have extended the feature-based document meta-model of the Document Product Lines approach with an organiza-tional metamodel. For a given configuration of the feature model, we assign tasks to different members of the organization to con-tribute to the document contents. Moreover, the relationships between features define an ordering of the tasks, which may be refined to produce a specification of the document workflow model automatically. The generation of customized software manuals is used to illustrate the proposal.

Variable Data Printing solutions provide means to generate documents whose content varies according to some criteria. Since the early Mail Merge-like applications that generated letters with destination data taken from databases, different languages and frameworks have been developed with increasing levels of sophistication. Current tools allow the generation of highly customized documents that are variable not only in content, but also in layout. However, most frameworks are technology-oriented, and their use requires high skills in implementation-related tools (XML, XPATH, and others), which do not include support for domain-related tasks like identification of document content variability.In this paper, we introduce DPLfw, a framework for variable content document generation based on Software Product Line Engineering principles. It is an implementation of the Document Product Lines (DPL) approach, which was defined with the aim of supporting variable content document generation from a domain-oriented point of view. DPL models document content variability in terms of features, and product line-like processes support the generation of documents. We define the DPLfw architecture, and illustrate its use in the definition of variable-content emergency plans.

We introduce a process-based approach to navigational design of hypermedia applications. Unlike most current methods, which use the information structure as the basis for building the navigational structure, we start from a workflow-like process model to create a two-level navigational model. On one hand, the strong navigational schema is composed of nodes called activity views and links derived from control flow relationships of the process model. On the other hand, a weak navigational schema is developed for each activity view based on the information a given actor has to use to perform the associated activity. Our approach allows designers to solve in a natural way the problems where the business processes prevail over the information structure.