The diploma thesis focuses on the analysis of a document management system (DMS) pilot implementation in the environment of a Czech bank. The thesis is divided into three parts; the first part is theoretical and remaining two parts are practical (analytical). The theoretical part is devoted to summarization of basic theoretical knowledge in the field of DMS and in a pilot deployment of information systems. The second part describes the EMC xCP 2.1 platform and evaluates its advantages and disadvantages compared to competing products. The third part describes the technological implementation and deployment of a new DMS pilot solution in a bank. Further it analyzes and describes the follow-up activities and related projects that increase the DMS usability in a real business applications. The diploma thesis concurrently focuses on the business requirements analysis including constrains of a new solution deployment, as well as the DMS technological aspects description and the solution design. The author of this thesis has been working as an analyst in the IT company and has been in a long-term cooperation with the DMS team in the bank. The motivation for choosing this topic is to make a summary and clarification of knowledge gained on projects in the the bank and to take an advantage of it in the future cooperation.

This diploma thesis deals with the issues of risks in document creation processes and the possibilities of their minimization through the implementation of document automation tools. The thesis identifies the motives and goals of three major companies in the Czech Republic which have decided to implement a system for document automation Legito. Using the FMEA method, this thesis demonstrates the influence of document automation in minimizing identified risk incorporated with document creation. Furthermore, the thesis deals with the analysis of expected risks associated with the implementation of the document automation system and its subsequent adoption by end-users. From the obtained information, the author of the thesis formulates a general process of implementing document automation systems, which defines the various aspects necessary for the successful deployment of the document automation system in companies.

Automatic machine understanding of documents from image inputs enables many applications in modern document workflows, digital archives of historical documents, and general machine intelligence, among others. Together, the techniques for understanding document images comprise the field of Document Image Analysis (DIA). Within DIA, the research community has identified several sub-problems, such as page segmentation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). As the field has matured, there has been a trend of moving away from heuristic-based methods, designed for particular tasks and domains of documents, and moving towards machine learning methods that learn to solve tasks from examples of input/output pairs. Within machine learning, a particular class of models, known as deep learning models, have established themselves as the state-of-the-art for many image-based applications, including DIA. While traditional machine learning models typically operate on features designed by researchers, deep learning models are able to learn task-specific features directly from raw pixel inputs.This dissertation is collection of papers that proposes several deep learning models to solve a variety of tasks within DIA. The first task is historical document binarization, where an input image of a degraded historical document is converted to a bi-tonal image to separate foreground text from background regions. The next part of the dissertation considers document segmentation problems, including identifying the boundary between the document page and its background, as well as segmenting an image of a data table into rows, columns, and cells. Finally, a variety of deep models are proposed to solve recognition tasks. These tasks include whole document image classification, identifying the font of a given piece of text, and transcribing handwritten text in low-resource languages.

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Owner companies should consider all elements of Document Management during a project’s life cycle, identify shortcomings and address them successfully to ensure successful completion of projects and ultimately to also ensure legal compliance as stipulated by contractual agreements. Proper governance during the execution of projects involves, amongst others, the establishment of structures and processes, with appropriate checks and balances built into these structures and processes, to enable all stakeholders to be in a position to have access to relevant documentation. Executing projects makes a huge demand on the flow and management of project related documentation through the different phases of these projects. The research, as documented in this dissertation, investigates and evaluates whether Sasol Technology, as the project execution agent for the Sasol Business Units, has efficient governing Document Management processes and procedures in place to support the successful execution of capital projects. Sasol Technology uses a stage gate model, associated with project life cycles, as a systematic approach for the execution of capital projects. Document Management is a new business function that was established in 2008. Not all the functions involved in the life cycle of project execution are fully aligned with the central function managing documentation. There is thus a need for a fully integrated Document Management System, involving all the functions of Sasol which are involved during the different phases of project execution. The literature study analyses existing world best document management and records management practices and procedures and points out that meticulous and strict document and records management practices form the backbone of organisational authentic evidence compliance. The research design method that was chosen to authenticate the research question is an Exploratory Qualitative Approach, combined with a Descriptive Approach. Results are obtained from a combination of three methods. Published and available existing data of how documents are managed in Sasol was gathered and secondary findings are established. Focused and structured interviews were then conducted with experienced team members from the different functions involved in project execution and lastly, e-mail administrated questionnaires were developed and distributed to relevant project team members within Sasol Technology to assess the current system and to determine additional requirements for an enhanced Document Management System, specifically applicable to owner companies in the project execution environment. Whereas the scrutiny of the secondary sources provides a background and the progress iii made with regard to setting requirements for a standardised Document Management System for the execution of projects in the Sasol Technology and some of the other Sasol Business Units, the primary data findings indicate how the project team members perceive the existing Sasol Technology Document Management System to be. Key findings include, that documentation life cycle management is not fully developed and needs to be addressed in the Sasol Technology project execution environment. Furthermore, integration of the documentation management of the various departments, functions and structures in Sasol will enable better and improved management of project documentation. The specific output of this dissertation is the recommendation of an improved Document Management System to allow the different functions within Sasol Technology and some other Sasol Business Units to have access to an integrated system, included in it all relevant documentation requirements during the life cycle of projects. An added deliverable is a framework of requirements to be included in a document management philosophy, not only for Sasol, but also for other owner companies during project execution. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Owner companies should consider all elements of Document Management during a project’s life cycle, identify shortcomings and address them successfully to ensure successful completion of projects and ultimately to also ensure legal compliance as stipulated by contractual agreements. Proper governance during the execution of projects involves, amongst others, the establishment of structures and processes, with appropriate checks and balances built into these structures and processes, to enable all stakeholders to be in a position to have access to relevant documentation. Executing projects makes a huge demand on the flow and management of project related documentation through the different phases of these projects. The research, as documented in this dissertation, investigates and evaluates whether Sasol Technology, as the project execution agent for the Sasol Business Units, has efficient governing Document Management processes and procedures in place to support the successful execution of capital projects. Sasol Technology uses a stage gate model, associated with project life cycles, as a systematic approach for the execution of capital projects. Document Management is a new business function that was established in 2008. Not all the functions involved in the life cycle of project execution are fully aligned with the central function managing documentation. There is thus a need for a fully integrated Document Management System, involving all the functions of Sasol which are involved during the different phases of project execution. The literature study analyses existing world best document management and records management practices and procedures and points out that meticulous and strict document and records management practices form the backbone of organisational authentic evidence compliance. The research design method that was chosen to authenticate the research question is an Exploratory Qualitative Approach, combined with a Descriptive Approach. Results are obtained from a combination of three methods. Published and available existing data of how documents are managed in Sasol was gathered and secondary findings are established. Focused and structured interviews were then conducted with experienced team members from the different functions involved in project execution and lastly, e-mail administrated questionnaires were developed and distributed to relevant project team members within Sasol Technology to assess the current system and to determine additional requirements for an enhanced Document Management System, specifically applicable to owner companies in the project execution environment. Whereas the scrutiny of the secondary sources provides a background and the progress iii made with regard to setting requirements for a standardised Document Management System for the execution of projects in the Sasol Technology and some of the other Sasol Business Units, the primary data findings indicate how the project team members perceive the existing Sasol Technology Document Management System to be. Key findings include, that documentation life cycle management is not fully developed and needs to be addressed in the Sasol Technology project execution environment. Furthermore, integration of the documentation management of the various departments, functions and structures in Sasol will enable better and improved management of project documentation. The specific output of this dissertation is the recommendation of an improved Document Management System to allow the different functions within Sasol Technology and some other Sasol Business Units to have access to an integrated system, included in it all relevant documentation requirements during the life cycle of projects. An added deliverable is a framework of requirements to be included in a document management philosophy, not only for Sasol, but also for other owner companies during project execution. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Digital search engine, taking a search request from user and then returning a result responded to the request to the user, is indispensable for modern humans who are used to surfing the Internet. On the other hand, the digital document PDF is accepted by more and more people and becomes widely used in this day and age due to the convenience and effectiveness. It follows that, the traditional library has already started to be replaced by the digital one. Combining these two factors, a document based search engine that is able to query a digital document database with an input file is urgently needed. This thesis is a software development that aims to design and implement a prototype of such search engine, and propose latent optimization methods for Loredge. This research can be mainly divided into two categories: Prototype Development and Optimization Analysis. It involves an analytical research on sample documents provided by Loredge and a multi-perspective performance analysis. The prototype contains reading, preprocessing and similarity measurement. The reading part reads in a PDF file by using an imported Java library Apache PDFBox. The preprocessing processes the in-reading document and generates document fingerprint. The similarity measurement is the final stage that measures the similarity between the input fingerprint with all the document fingerprints in the database. The optimization analysis is to balance resource consumptions involving response time, accuracy rate and memory consumption. According to the performance analysis, the shorter the document fingerprint is, the better performance the search program presents. Moreover, a permanent feature database and a similarity based filtration mechanism are proposed to further optimize the program. This project has laid a solid foundation for further study in the document based search engine by providing a feasible prototype and enough relevant experimental data. This study figures out that the following study should mainly focuses on improving the effectiveness of the database access, which involves data entry labeling and search algorithm optimization. / Digital sökmotor, som tar en sökfråga från användaren och sedan returnerar ett resultat som svarar på den begäran tillbaka till användaren, är oumbärligt för moderna människor som brukar surfa på Internet. Å andra sidan, det digitala dokumentets format PDF accepteras av fler och fler människor, och det används i stor utsträckning i denna tidsålder på grund av bekvämlighet och effektivitet. Det följer att det traditionella biblioteket redan har börjat bytas ut av det digitala biblioteket. När dessa två faktorer kombineras, framgår det att det brådskande behövs en dokumentbaserad sökmotor, som har förmåga att fråga en digital databas om en viss fil. Den här uppsatsen är en mjukvaruutveckling som syftar till att designa och implementera en prototyp av en sådan sökmotor, och föreslå relevant optimeringsmetod för Loredge. Den här undersökningen kan huvudsakligen delas in i två kategorier, prototyputveckling och optimeringsanalys. Arbeten involverar en analytisk forskning om exempeldokument som kommer från Loredge och en prestandaanalys utifrån flera perspektiv. Prototypen innehåller läsning, förbehandling och likhetsmätning. Läsningsdelen läser in en PDF-fil med hjälp av en importerad Java bibliotek, Apache PDFBox. Förbehandlingsdelen bearbetar det inlästa dokumentet och genererar ett dokumentfingeravtryck. Likhetsmätningen är det sista steget, som mäter likheten mellan det inlästa fingeravtrycket och fingeravtryck av alla dokument i Loredge databas. Målet med optimeringsanalysen är att balansera resursförbrukningen, som involverar responstid, noggrannhet och minnesförbrukning. Ju kortare ett dokuments fingeravtryck är, desto bättre prestanda visar sökprogram enligt resultat av prestandaanalysen. Dessutom föreslås en permanent databas med fingeravtryck, och en likhetsbaserad filtreringsmekanism för att ytterligare optimera sökprogrammet. Det här projektet har lagt en solid grund för vidare studier om dokumentbaserad sökmotorn, genom att tillhandahålla en genomförbar prototyp och tillräckligt relevanta experimentella data. Den här studie visar att kommande forskning bör huvudsakligen inriktas på att förbättra effektivitet i databasåtkomsten, vilken innefattar data märkning och optimering av sökalgoritm.

The legal nature of the bill of lading as a negotiable document of title has allowed it to provide the basis of a system in which bankers provide credit for the financing of international sales contracts on the strength of the security afforded by the goods represented in the bill. The sea waybill has appeared as a substitute for the bill of lading and, despite its nature as a nonnegotiable document, it can be employed in a manner which allows it to provide collateral security to banks. Multimodal transport documents which may be issued in negotiable or non-negotiable form assume the same legal role as the bill oflading or sea waybill respectively. The inclusion of specific articles in the 1993 Revision of the UCP relating to non-negotiable sea waybills and multimodal transport documents affirms their acceptability to banks financing international sales contracts under documentary letters of credit. / Law / LL.M.

Thesis (MPhil (Afrikaans and Dutch))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / In this study, students’ reactions towards linguistic politeness and the lack thereof in letters distributed by Stellenbosch University (SU), is tested. The aim of the research is to determine the answers to mainly two questions: Does letters which lack linguistic politeness influence institutional image negatively? Is linguistic politeness considered a vital component in institutional letters? SU is currently engaged in establishing the institution’s proposed image in letters directed to students. For that reason, male and female students from the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Natural Sciences were chosen as respondents. The pioneers in the field of pragmatic politeness, Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, identified approximately 40 politeness strategies utilised in social interaction. According to Brown and Levinson, these strategies protect two intrinsic aspects of the human personality: positive face (roughly, the want to be respected by others) and negative face (roughly, the want not to be impeded by others). Consequently, two official letters from SU were tested to establish senior students’ interpretation of the letters’ contribution to face loss. One letter, incorporating no politeness strategies, and a manipulated version comprising appropriate strategies was employed. The research was accomplished by means of pared observations in which fifteen analogous politeness concepts were tested. Senior students responded to comparable questions that assessed the letters’ effect on their positive and negative face. Despite this, the respondents were never fully aware of the fact that their opinion of politeness was tested. The next step entailed the statistical processing of the answers that were ultimately featured on comparable histograms. The results prove that the writer (as a representative of SU) of the letter in which politeness strategies lack, shows no respect for the student (she/the letter generates positive face loss). However, this letter is mainly responsible for negative face loss which means the writer is excessively prescriptive. Interestingly enough, the student respondents were more sensitive towards linguistic politeness in the manipulated text than the lack thereof in the original version. Alternatively, the students are more appreciative towards the institutional letter which employs positive and negative politeness strategies. The results prove the high probability of linguistic politeness promoting institutional image and white, Afrikaans speaking students’ regard for linguistic politeness in institutional letters.

The legal nature of the bill of lading as a negotiable document of title has allowed it to provide the basis of a system in which bankers provide credit for the financing of international sales contracts on the strength of the security afforded by the goods represented in the bill. The sea waybill has appeared as a substitute for the bill of lading and, despite its nature as a nonnegotiable document, it can be employed in a manner which allows it to provide collateral security to banks. Multimodal transport documents which may be issued in negotiable or non-negotiable form assume the same legal role as the bill oflading or sea waybill respectively. The inclusion of specific articles in the 1993 Revision of the UCP relating to non-negotiable sea waybills and multimodal transport documents affirms their acceptability to banks financing international sales contracts under documentary letters of credit. / Law / LL.M.