Twenty years ago the distinction between textual data and program codes could not have been clearer. Since then a new form of computer object has appeared thanks to internet and multimedia : the electronic document. Halfway between code and data, the electronic document has content structure forme a certain number of multimedi objects are linked to it, it is linked to other documents of the same type or different tpye, a certain interactivity with the user, etc.
Techniques have been developed to stock and access easily the contents of electronic documents to represent their content in various manners according to the context (the context of the printed book being quite different from the context of a web page on a screen which is added to non-standard representations (Braille, voice synthesis etc.), in order to transmit and exchanger electronic documents (in particular on the Web), to find it easily among millions of others (by adding meta-data and indexing), to process it (analysis, indexing, extraction of data , automatic summary, translation, etc.).
