"Document Engineering" is evolving as a new discipline for specifying, designing, and implementing the electronic documents that request or provide interfaces to business processes via Web-based services. The essence of Document Engineering is the analysis and design methods that yield formal models to describe the information these processes or services require. Good Document Engineering practice emphasizes the reuse of existing models wherever possible and requires that new models be described in ways that encourage their reuse by others.

Reusable patterns in Document Engineering are found at both the implementation level in the form of EDI and XML libraries and also at the conceptual level in terms of libraries of models that describe common business processes and the organization of activities between businesses. Re-using patterns at these more abstract levels facilitates interoperability between different technology implementations.