Future paradigms of automated processing of business documents

In this paper we summarize the results obtained so far in the communities interested in the development of automated processing techniques as applied to business documents, and devise a few evolutions that are demanded by the current stage of either those techniques by themselves or by collateral sector advancements. It emerges a clear picture of a field that has put an enormous effort in solving problems that changed a lot during the last 30 years, and is now rapidly evolving to incorporate document processing into workflow management systems on one side and to include features derived by the introduction of cloud computing technologies on the other side. We propose an architectural schema for business document processing that comes from the two above evolution lines.