Abstract
Currently, the information and Internet technologies are widely used in modern organizations. Under the trend toward e-manufacturing, most technical knowledge, documents and information are transformed from paper-based into electronic formats. In order to improve the efficiency of document security and authentication process management, this paper proposes a heuristic two-phase model for authority and authentication sequence determination for technical documents. In Phase 1 (i.e. authority determination), the keyword extraction and document categorization rules are incorporated into the authority reasoning algorithm to emphasize the importance of technical document contents. In Phase 2, according to the authority reasoning result, six content- and reviewer-oriented indices are proposed for authentication sequence determination. Based on the reasoning models, an integrated prototype system is developed and a demonstration case is also provided to validate the effectiveness of the methodologies. The model and technique explored in this research can be used as the kernel for technical document management and exchange under the computer-integrated manufacturing environment.