In this paper we present the notion of active documents. The basic idea is that in the future, users of documents in any networked system should not just be able to communicate with other users, but also with documents. To put it differently, we believe that communication in networks should be understood in a more general sense than it usually is. Although our notion will, at first glance, almost look like science fiction, we will show that good approximations can indeed be implemented. We conclude this short paper by pointing out a number of important applications of our new concept and mention cases where it has been applied already, successfully.

eLearning, WBT, web based teaching, knowledge management