On July 1, 2009, the Dutch Electronic Disclosure Act came into force. The current official published versions of Staatscourant, Staatsblad and Tractatenblad are now available at www.officielebekendmakingen.nl. Sdu Uitgevers, following a government mandate, made the transition from paper to electronic publishing. The government has developed an on-line service desk that mediates between the publications' submitters and producers.

Sdu asked Lunatech to design and build a number of systems to support the new workflow:

• A comprehensive system supporting the entire work process from order intake to delivering the finished publication
• Conversion from different XML formats to the new XML format for official publications
• Converting XML documents to HTML (which must comply with the accessibility standards)
• Converting XML documents into ODF (Open Document Format), the ISO standard format for 'office' documents
• Adding metadata to PDF files to meet the PDF/A-1a standard
• Reports on PDF files: number of pages with images and specific tags
• Connecting the overall system to the on-line service desk and existing Sdu systems

Technical details

The overall system is built as a web application which makes use of the following technologies:

• JBoss Seam Enterprise Application Framework
• JBoss Rules (Drools ) to determine the necessary metadata and workflow for each document
• SOAP MTOM for communication with the on-line service desk
• Oracle databases
• iText PDF library
• The XML transformations are written in XSLT2 and use the Saxon XSLT processor
• XML validation by Schematron

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