A system and method for distributing the fault management functions throughout a communications network. With this structure, the scanning speed of the carriage can be increased to be higher than the set speed once, and then reduced to the set speed, thus making it possible to shorten the time for the carriage to move from the home position to the top of the document to be scanned, while suppressing the load on the CPU. In the table field element provision method, a requested fields type element required to designate a field of a metadata table is included in a query result value type in the SOAP query operation. A series of points 52 representing the scanned region is stored as a point cloud 54 in the memory device 48.