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Functional Characteristics |
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For any civilized society documents have always served as significant tools in the process of growth and development. Documents have been catering to the need, want and demand of millions of people by serving as a vast pool of information. The information that a document possesses can be used for varied purposes and they can also be communicated effectively. A lot of research and in depth studies have been made throughout the world regarding the functional characteristics of documents. There are a host of functional characteristics of documents that we come across in our daily life. Documents also certify varied type of localized characteristics that are prevalent in todays society.
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Documents come with a manifest nature. In order to manifest authority the documents must be having a physical form. Although we consider information to be intangible but the process of documentation makes it tangible. Documents in all their forms are needed to be having any physical character whether they are in the form of ink and papers or whether they are digitalized by the means of computers or other electronic equipments. Rolf Laundauer, the computer scientist from the worlds largest computer firm IBM has been acclaimed for his observations and studies on the manifesting nature of documents.
The other major functional characteristics of documents are contextuality and relevance. Suppose a communication is in flow among individuals in a particular context. Now the individuals who are taking part in the process of communication are involved into shared understanding. Now if a particular individual doesn't share a portion of the context then the objective of the whole conversation may get hampered as the other party gets a distorted information. For instance hypertext documents that exist according to a particular context may get lost if it is printed and thus the off-line reading context gets altered giving an entirely different meaning.
One of the basic functional characteristics of documents is perhaps evolvability. Documents are considered as the definite source of information that can help us immensely in serving your needs. We also expect that the documents would be having the best known information. There comes the need of updating the information. Frequently updating the relevant information can be of tremendous help for us. Thus the old documents are time to time revised and are changed with a new edition. Old documents serve as archives so as to understand the evolving character of the documents. Most of the modern day technologies have been benefited a lot by evolving from older to newer versions and the same can be said about documents.
One of the prime functional characteristics of documents is that of the ability to render. It is believed that any abstract entity that can be understood in any form can be documented in a particular context with the objective of rendering it at the time of requirement. From a particular document different types of physical or electronic representations are possible. For instance a web page and a word document format although may carry similar information but have different properties as well as appearances. Documents are also believed to manifest varied types of affordances. Thus a digitalized document may come with easy editing form while the paper documents may come with simpler manipulations.
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