A formal approach to modeling office information systems

Abstract

Abstract. This paper formally specifies a document model for office information systems, including formal definitions of document types (frame templates), a document type hierarchy, folders, and folder organizations.Folder Organizations are defined using predicates and directed graphs. A Reconstruction Problem for folder organizations is then formulated; viz., under what circumstances it is possible to reconstruct a folder organization from its folder level predicates. The Reconstruction Problem is solved in terms of such graph-theoretic concepts as Associated Digraphs, transitive closure, and redundant/nonredundant filing paths. A Transitive Closure Inversion algorithm is then presented which efficiently recovers a Folder Organization digraph from its Associated Digraph.

A predicate-driven document filing system

“…That is, homogeneous documents (of the same document types) are grouped together. TEXPROS [27] provides a heterogeneous environment of organizing documents using predicate-driven filing criteria. Heterogeneous documents (of different document types) can be grouped into a folder only if they satisfy the predicate of the folder.…”

“…In a folder organization, frame instances belonging to any folder f are obtained by imposing an additional local predicate [27], associated with f, on the globalpredicates [27] associated with the immediate predecessor folders off. The global predicate of a folder f governs the contents off.…”

“…It is a combination of filing and retrieval systems, which support storing [22,26,27], classifying [10,11,20,25], categorizing [17,18,23,26,27], retrieving [12,13,15,16] and reproducing [24] documents, as well as extracting [9,10], browsing [12], retrieving [12,13,15,16] and synthesizing [24] information from a variety of documents. The document model for TEXPROS employs a dual approach to describing and classifying the office documents by defining both a document type hierarchy and a folder organization (or logical filing structure).…”

“…The folder organization specifying the document filing view is defined using predicates and directed graphs. In [27], we investigated the Reconstruction Problem, namely, under what circumstances it is possible to reconstruct a folder organization from its folder level predicates. In this paper, we investigate the Predicate-Driven Filing Problem: given a folder organization, in which the folders are specified using predicates, how do frame instances deposit in proper folders based on these predicates.…”