Abstract

Many different formalisms have been used to represent digital documents and document processing, including formal grammars, graph structures, and objects. Logic-based approaches, until recently conspicuously absent, are now also emerging. But how much expressivity is required in order to completely capture the information carried by an XML document, or to adequately represent document processing? We describe some considerations which suggest that not only is full first order predicate logic required, but so are a variety of modal operators.