Supporting office document architectures with constrained types

Data models have been proposed as a means of defining the objects and operations in an office information system. Office documents, because of their highly variable structure and multimedia content, are a difficult class of objects to model. The modeling task is further complicated by document architecture standards used for interchange between systems. We present an approach to data modeling based on constrained type definitions that allows architecture standards to be defined and ensures that individual document types conform to those standards. The ADABTPL model, which is used to define the schema of document types and standards, is described.