Before you start implementation, you need to define the business requirements through collaboration with the various stakeholders. Defining the business requirement involves examining the documents that you want to process, determining which fields to capture, and deciding what to do with captured data.
Taskmaster applications vary in their scale and complexity. But they all seek to capture data from structured documents, which are also known as Forms. The documents can be printed pages or electronic images, but the data on the page must be first located and then interpreted with maximum accuracy.
If you are processing various document types, you must decide whether the documents are pre-sorted or processed as a mixed batch. If they are presorted, you can simplify implementation by processing each type independently, either with a separate application or a separate workflow for each type. However, if they are processed as mixed batches, you need a more sophisticated system of page identification and document assembly.
Although the goal is to create a fully automated system, there are inevitably points at which manual intervention is required. The business requirements must specify how to determine whether the information is accurate and what to do when there is a problem. After you defined the business requirements, you can design the application.
The tutorial does not provide a detailed procedure for determining business requirements. Instead, the tutorial presents the general Taskmaster application architecture and then examines the documents to process as you develop the TravelDocs application. This sample application is designed to demonstrate basic techniques that implement the main steps in the Taskmaster application workflow.
