A document is no longer a passive linear presentation of text. An intelligent document contains knowledge about itself and its environment. It supports assembly of documents based on inputs given by the user. An active intelligent document is able to construct and transform itself dynamically. Intelligent Assembly One of the basic problems in document management is to provide on-demand generation of individualised documents through dynamic document assembly .
Document assembly composes new documents from an existing collection of documents.
Naturally, document markup and structure contribute to the retrieval of the document fragments. Inherent information is present in the document or directly computable from the document, e.g., keyword or phrase lists. Besides inherent information, supplementary information is associated with the document. Supplementary information includes, e.g., references, thesauri and common-sense knowledge. Supplementary information can be described, for example, in dependencies or conceptual hierarchies, and can reside in additional document markup, as well as in separate databases.