Document Services Community Group

Document Services Community Group,

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the new group!

Introduction
I would like to broach a few topics for discussion. Firstly, what are document services? Secondly, regarding the design of interfaces for document services, action queues could be of use as a mechanism for providing sequences of actions for document editing software and Web browsers so that multiple document services could, for instance, highlight document content for end-users simultaneously. Thirdly, reacting to document editing by end-users is a relevant topic, one that involves considering how best to apprise a set of document services of updates as end-users edit documents.

Document Services
Document services are client-local, on-prem, or remote services upon documents, portions of documents, or selections of document content. Examples of document services include: spellchecking, grammar checking, proofreading, fact checking, mathematical proof checking, reasoning checking, argumentation checking, and narrative checking.

Action Queues
I am presently brainstorming how we might best design interfaces for document services which provide queues of actions and raise events as actions are enqueued.

By “actions”, I mean scripting objects which describe actions for document editors or Web browsers to perform as end-users edit or review documents. For example, one variety of action might involve highlighting document content with a described meaning. In this way, document services would not directly edit documents. Document services would, instead, enqueue described actions and document editing software, for document editing scenarios, and Web browsers, for document reviewing scenarios, would dequeue, process, and perform these actions.

This approach appears to simplify the design of document service interfaces while requiring an extensible vocabulary of described actions. Any thoughts on these ideas?

Reacting to Document Editing
I am also presently brainstorming how we might best design interfaces for document services so that document services could react to the editing of documents by end-users. I wonder whether there might be any ideas, recommendations, or best practices with respect to apprising sets of document services as documents are edited by end-users?


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski