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. Copyright 2010 ACM.