Formal modeling of multistructured documents

The quantity of digital documents available is still growing. The various contexts of use of such documents need several kinds of descriptions of their contents and structures. Thus a same document can be described according to several concurrent structures. Designing models and tools to exploit these various kinds of structures simultaneously presents a real challenge. In this way we have built document repositories to achieve this aim. Indeed, we proposed fragmentation techniques to manage the various issues related to the management of multistructured documents (representation, storage, reconstruction, and management of concurrent structures). This paper is dedicated to the presentation of the formal model. We propose to describe with precision and concision the various concepts related to the multi-structured documents as well as rules related to the organization of these documents.