Abstract
AbstractOwing to the drastic development of the Internet and information technologies, electronic document management solutions have been widely applied in organizations. Among the document management activities, document authentication is one of the typical issues to ensure the document quality before publication. Reliable authentication relies on the effective management of authentication processes. Due to the variety of document features and contents, different documents might follow distinct authentication processes. If the administrator cannot totally recognize the document contents or the reviewer background, the authentication sequence cannot be accurately determined.Concerning efficiency of the electronic authentication model, this research proposes an Internet-based approach for document authentication process determination to improve the efficiency of documentation authentication and management. Combined with the document authority reasoning model, an heuristic algorithm for authentication sequence determination is developed. In the integrated algorithm, six content- and reviewer-oriented decision indices are provided. The content-oriented indices emphasize two critical document attributes (i.e., document type and keywords) for authentication sequence reasoning while the reviewer-oriented indices utilize the information about entry-level percentage, sequence history and hierarchical relationship of the authorized reviewers. The reasoning results can be used to directly carry out document authentication or to provide the decision maker an initial suggestion for validation. In addition, based on the reasoning model, a prototype system and a case study are developed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Incorporated with the approach developed in this research, the document management system will have the learning capability for accurate authentication sequence reasoning and effectiveness and efficiency of document authentication activities in the collaborative environment can be significantly improved.