While dealing with such complex engineering processes, it is often unclear what a document really is. The three layer architecture in can help in this respect:
Document layer architecture
Figure 4:
Presentation view
This is the daily experience with a document. It is a piece of paper with a certain amount of information which is presented using various fonts, layouts and graphical elements. Progressive people use this document in electronic form.
The main focus of this layer is to present the right set of information in an appropriate layout. Therefore it is the primary domain of typewriters, word processors and electronic distribution media. I would even position HTML in this layer.
Engineering Base
which has no access to the content of the administrated data.
Nowadays engineering tools produce document views using report generators or interfaces to common word processors often proudly marketed as "documentation interface". In a broader sense, the information in the engineering base itself and not only the exported presentations must be treated as documents.
If views are required which reflect information from more than one engineering tool, then either some connection of the tools is required, or the documents must be assembled manually.
Obviously there is a gap between the presentation view and the engineering base.
Document Base
The existing gap between the two layers mentioned above can be closed by introducing a middle layer, the document base. This layer must be built upon a standard data format which can be used to generate all the required outputs (document views) in the presentation layer while still having the power to keep the semantics of the engineering base at least to some extent.
This layer is the domain of SGML/XML, which is easy to create, able to define powerful data structures and not too hard to read by humans as well as by machines.