In today’s world of the World Wide Web, with increasingly ubiquitous electronic documents, the distinction among text, databases, and documents is gradually disappearing. As digital documents become essential to day-to-day organizational work, retrieving and managing them is a fundamental task that, in general, is still erratic and unsystematic.

After a preface that provides a framework connecting the eight essays, the first chapter gives an overview of markup languages and elaborates on relevant topics such as the transition from HTML to XML; explains what the document object model (DOM) is; and briefly shows the relevance of these topics in the context of e-commerce.

Chapter 2 introduces search engines on the Web and provides numerous relevant references for those readers searching for intricate details. The chapter is written very clearly and is easy to understand, but goes into greater detail where required. The title reflects the content exactly. In short, this is my favorite chapter.

Chapter 3 is an outstanding resource for learning about metadata and its use in organizations. Especially compared to chapter 1, there is a plethora of references. Even common software, such as Microsoft Word or Windows98, is mentioned with a reference.

Unlike the aforementioned chapters, the fourth essay, “A Learner-Independent Evaluation of the Usefulness of Statistical Phrases for Automated Text Categorization,” could also be an empirical report delivered at a scientific conference. The rather scholarly style and exhaustive tables of results render it very different from the first three chapters.

Chapter 5 is similar to the previous one in the sense that it presents more of a research contribution than a survey. It reports on work in progress within the Eurosearch project, whose purpose is the design and implementation of a European federation of n search, with each search addressing a national Web space of documents expressed in the respective languages. The formal notation makes it a little harder to read, but it is undoubtedly a valuable contribution, with many excellent references.

The sixth chapter presents a preview of how Xanadu--Ted Nelson’s vision of a worldwide accessible superdatabase storing documents--may finally be achieved. The essay includes an introduction to SGML and techniques of information retrieval on which the rest of the essay builds. These basic building blocks, however, have already been explained in greater detail in one of the previous chapters.

The penultimate contribution, “Cooperative Documents Management in Multidisciplinary Healthcare,” gives an outside and application-oriented view on the topic. Some of the details may seem irrelevant, but it definitely is an excellent case study that shows how some of the techniques previously presented are used on a day-to-day basis in the real world.

The challenge of providing a uniform view of different metadata and heterogeneous legal databases in Europe is addressed in the final essay. The paper reports on how such a view can be implemented as a graphical user interface.

The book as a whole is a collection of useful and partly excellent essays. The order of the contributions seems somewhat arbitrary, and every chapter can be read independently of the others, resulting in the repetition of fundamental topics. I preferred the surveys, which are valuable reference resources that deserve space on a bookshelf next to one’s desk. The book is definitely not a must-have, but is still nice to have.