7.3 Office documents
This section is provided as a first attempt to identify and illustrate the characteristics of documents produced and exchanged in an ordinary office environment.
Although office documents can be classified according to a number of criteria and arranged in various classes (e.g. memorandum, business letter, report, minutes, etc.), their commonalities rather than their specific features have been stressed in order to devise one general office document structure.
From a general point of view, an office document consists of three parts: a front matter, the body matter and a back matter.
The body matter, apart from the subject, the salute and the adieu features, is or can be made very similar to the body of other document types (e.g. article). Therefore, features belonging to the core class or identified as floating features of the body matter, as defined in 6.2.2 and 6.3, will not be reviewed here.
The same remark applies to the back matter, consisting of bibliography, glossary and index features, which is very similar to the one defined in 6.2.2.
More interesting, and peculiar, is the front matter of an office document, which can be seen as a sort of document profile. The front matter carries information related to the fact that the document is produced and stored in a computer (to access it, you need a local file name, access rights, etc.), is exchanged by all possible means - postal mail, electronic mail, etc. -, which call in turn for an originator, an authorizing person, primary and secondary recipients, etc.; most of the time the recipients are invited to take action or to reply (action to take, deadline for replying); an office document is normally characterized by a number of statuses (draft/final, personal/confidential/internal, etc.), a well structured revision history, etc.
Most of this section is therefore devoted to the front matter and takes into account ISO standards (ODA document profile) as well as CCITT norms (X400 series). It also builds upon the results of a number of CEC projects in the field of document filing and archiving.
For sake of simplicity and generality, we have decided to leave out importance, copyright and quite a few other features. Far more dates could have been defined, and are actually defined in specific applications (e.g. expiry date for volatile information).
Here is a structured list of the features that are part of a generic office document:

Front matter

Document type
Title
Subject Field
Document reference
Additional user specific codes
References to other documents
In reply to
Local file system reference
File name
Location
Access rigths
User comments

Abstract
Keywords
Document date
Creation date
Revision History
Revision date
Version number
Reviser
Version reference
User comments

Originator
Person name
Organisation name
Address

Preparer
Author
Authorizing person
Primary recipient
Person name
Organisation name
Address
Action, action by

Secondary recipient
Person name
Organisation name
Address
Action, action by

Other user information
Document status
Sensitivity
Number of pages
Table of content
Language

Body matter
Subject
Salute
Body
Adieu
Appendix matter

Back matter
Bibliography
Glossary
Index

Most of the tags are shown in the following example (a business letter sent to one primary recipient with one blind copy). The marked up document is followed by its appearance.