The technology for processing documents shapes, among other things, the way we do business and conduct research; for instance, the typewriter and the fax machine have changed office procedure, and electronic mail has changed the way we collaborate on research projects.

Today, advances in hardware and network technology facilitate new types of interactive multimedia documents and processing systems that operate in distributed and heterogeneous environments. This new development has far-reaching implications, in particular for the way we teach and gather information.

The Dagstuhl Seminar on Document Processing brings together researchers with a strong background in modern document processing. They represent the areas of multimedia digital libraries and information systems, active and structured document, electronic publishing, document and character recognition, font technology and graphic communication, large, distributed textual databases and standarts. The seminar provides a forum for the document-processing community to articulate critical issues and to offer avenues of investigation and ultimate solutions. In accordance with the interdisciplinary character of the field, we are inviting a number of colleagues who also have long-standing research interests in related fields in computer science, in particular algorithms and data structures, human-computer interfaces, databases and formal languages.

As usual in Dagstuhl seminars, the format of the workshop gives all attendees the opportunity to present their own work in the form of a a talk or a software demonstration. Following the quite successful example of José Encarñaçao and James Foley in the Dagstuhl Seminar 9245 on Multimedia Systems, we also intend to organize working groups on a number of controversial topics. The working groups summarize the state of the art, identify critical issues, propose strategies and discuss implications. Their findings will be included into the seminar Report.

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