A general document recognition system is described which is intended to be used
in connection with an electronic document transmission function used on a computer
network. The general document recognition system is set up to recognize any number
of document types created by application programs in the network and is also set
up with rules as to how to extract destination data from each document type. The
extracted data from each document can be the actual intended destination, such
as a facsimile telephone number, or can be the identity of the intended recipient
individual. If a recipient, rather than a destination, is extracted from the document,
the general document recognition system can query a previously designated external
database to recover the destination information for that recipient. An LDAP database
is the preferred external database for this function.
