In e-business development, semantics-oriented document exchange is becoming important, because it can support crossdomain user connection, business transaction and collaboration. To provide this support, this paper proposes a DOC Mechanism to exchange semantically interoperable business documents between heterogeneous enterprise information systems. This mechanism is designed on a layered-sign network, which enables any exchanged e-business document to be independently interpretable without losing semantic consistency. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.12 [Interoperability]: Data mapping; I.7.5 [Document and Text Processing]: Document Capture - document analysis; K.4.3 [Electronic Commerce]: Electronic data interchange (EDI). General Terms Design, Languages Keywords Document engineering, document exchange, electronic business, sign, representation, semantics, concept, XML Product Map