Electronic document management in office systems

Rabitti F.

Electronic document  Office systems 

This paper summarizes the main aspects concerning the management of electronic documents, that is, documents as they are represented inside the automated office. An electronic document is a multimedia data object which is an aggregation of text, images, attribute, and audio components. A system for the management of electronic documents will be constituted by a number of electronic document servers operating in a network environment together with the user workstations, which are the source of requests concerning document creation, modification and retrieval. Two types of issues are relevant for the management of electronic documents: those relevant to the entire office information system and those concerning only the electronic document server. In the first category the most important issue is the electronic document representation, which make possible interactions between servers and workstations on the ground of these objects and operations on them. The proposed document model makes use of the same structural organizations for document instances, document types and document queries. Conformance to the international standards under developement (ODA) has also been taken in to account. In the second category are included document storage strategies, query processing and access and indexing methods. Considerable attention has been given to flexible retrieval with queries on arbitrary document content rather than keywords or document descriptors. A number of access methods have been evaluated for both text and attributed data.