There are many types of documents. Also, they come in many formats. Thy go from small leaflets to volumes of books. In general, a document is a package of information created to preserve some particular focal information and items related to that information. The components are normally organized in some order that may be sequential, hierarchical, or a combination of both.
Packages are convenient containers but also serve for storage purposes. Documents with related content, or the information they carry, are organized in collections. Semantically speaking, in an abstract space of information, related documents would be place closer to each other than to unrelated documents. The semantic distance is a measure of how similar documents are to each other.
Electronic documents have particular characteristics that make them amenable to automatic processing, such as encryption and compression. Although it is important to differentiate information from the package wherein it exists, most processing of information, particularly computer-based information processing treats the symbol or package as equal to the information it carries. In other words, the paper is only a word, it is not really paper.
Likewise, computer-based information processing is really processing of words, symbols, bits and bytes, but not meanings and concepts.
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