Document Management with the Knowledge Provider 

Introduction

The knowledge and information contained in documents can have a significant impact on the efficiency and productivity of your company.

The Knowledge Provider (KPro) is a general and comprehensive infrastructure that provides cross-application and cross-media document management technologies. The Knowledge Provider is a component of SAP Web Application Server and can be integrated into any SAP application.

Concepts

Various Information Entities

When dealing with documents, the Knowledge Provider differentiates between the following information entities:

·         Content

·         Content index

·         Administrative data

·         Model data

A text file exists for a section of documentation. This text file contains the content. The file exists independently of whether or not other information about this section exists. Administrative data could be the person responsible, the creation date, and the name of the documentation to which the section in question belongs. The model data defines, among other things, what attributes the document has. The existence of the attribute “author” is therefore part of the model data. The content index is a secondary representation of the content. The content index makes it possible to have content searches (for example, full-text search). You do not always have to define the content index separately. Sometimes it may be more efficient to duplicate parts of the administrative data (for example, author) in the content index or in the content (self-describing documents).

Documents and Document-Like Objects

In the context of the Knowledge Provider, the term “document” is used in a broad sense. It can refer to text, video, audio, software programs, websites, and controls. In other words, the Knowledge Provider definition of the term “document” is much wider than the classical sense of the word. In the Knowledge Provider, a document can be any self-contained document-like object.

Application-Specific Content Models

In the context of the Knowledge Provider, there is no fixed definition of the term “document”. The Knowledge Provider allows its client applications the freedom to define and create their own specific definitions of document models. An application-specific content model contains in particular the following elements:

·         Classes for relationships

·         Classes for logical documents

·         Classes for physical documents

Content models function as the structure and the architecture of document-like objects within the application-specific context. This means that every client application can use its own specific metadata descriptions, while still being able to exchange information with other applications.

Application-specific content model for a magazine article

In this example, there are two classes, one for a logical document, and one for a physical document with specific properties. There are also a number of classes for relationships. The instances of the relationship classes CONTENT VERSION, FORMAT VERSION, and LANGUAGE VERSION make it possible to administrate any number of different versions according to different criteria (modified content, translation, format conversions).

Intension and Extension

The Knowledge Provider provides both simplification and automation functions in several areas of document management. A central part of this is a two-level approach to document management, consisting of intension and extension.

The logical properties of a document, including meaning and purpose, are referred to as intension.

The actual physical representation of the document itself is the extension.

Intension and extension are represented in the Knowledge Provider by two administration objects: logical document and physical document.

The intension of this section is the conceptual background of the Knowledge Provider. (However, this statement does not make any assumptions about how this will be achieved.) This section is available both in German and in English. It is also available in electronic form, for example, in the form of HTML Help or plain HTML, and can also be printed. Therefore, the physical representation of the document exists in various forms, that is, extensions.

Relationships

Documents in isolation are worthless. Every document-like object has relationships to other objects. These relationships can be either implicit or explicit. The Knowledge Provider administrates not only document-like objects themselves, but also the relationships between objects. The Knowledge Provider also allows relationship classes to be defined, which means you can identify and classify the types of relationships between documents.

Relationships and references between documents are dynamic. If you make a change to a document in the Knowledge Provider, this does not mean that a costly chain reaction of manual changes to other documents has to be made.

If a note is created which relates to a specific document, the link between the note and the document can be made explicit by means of a relationship. In the same way, relationships can be used to display hyperlink paths in documents, thus making explicit the interrelationship between the documents linked by hyperlinks.

Late Binding and Context Resolution

If various documents are interconnected by several relationships (for example, hyperlinks), these documents are no longer self-contained. This problem applies to all types of relationships, not just hyperlinks, and can occur between different documents, and between documents and business objects. The Knowledge Provider provides a solution to this problem by referencing logical documents (for example, logical hyperlink) and by implementing context resolution at runtime. This process is called late binding. This means that the physical document version that best matches the specified context is not selected from the set of physical documents belonging to the specified logical document until runtime. The version is selected on the basis of context information (user context or business context). Late binding, then, is the interface between intension and extension. Both information managed by the Knowledge Provider and other information from the Knowledge Provider client application can be involved in the resolution process. The network of relationships remains intact, even if documents are translated, if document content is edited, or if a document is converted to a different format. This all helps to avoid expensive and time-consuming extra work.

Logical Hyperlink: Context Resolution

Versioning

The Knowledge Provider provides a powerful versioning concept. Knowledge Provider versioning supports multiple versioning based on a number of different criteria. Versioning can control language versions and format versions, among others. For example, a document can exist in German, English, and French, and in both PDF and HTML format.

Equal Access and Retrieval

The Knowledge Provider allows equal access to all document-like objects via HTTP, regardless of the underlying medium and the application-specific design of the website. The check-in and check-out mechanism ensures that authors cannot make conflicting changes to the same object at the same time. Text Retrieval & Information Extraction offers a range of retrieval strategies, including integration of search engines to allow full-text searches.

Content Storage Media

The Knowledge Provider provides document storage services. This means that SAP-based document management functions can be combined with a wide range of storage media.

See also Content Management Service.