Documentarisation Processes in Documents for Action (DofA): The Status of Annotations and Associated Cooperation Technologies

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on situations where documents serve to coordinate the work of a distributed collective engaged in common goal-directed activities. After defining the concept of semiotic products as resulting from symbolic communicational transactions, we present some coordination strategies which can be used to compensate for the spatio-socio-temporal distribution typical of these transactions. Among these strategies, it is proposed to study in detail the documentarisation strategy, which makes the material substrate mediating the transactions relatively durable and endows it with attributes making its further use possible. In our study of documentarisation processes, several novel concepts are introduced and used to describe Documents for Action (DofA), their characteristics and the conditions that should be respected for correctly annotating them.