An Automated Document Filing System

Abstract

TEXPROS (TEXt PROcessing System) is an automatic document processing system which supports text-based information representation and manipulation, conveying meanings from stored information within office document texts. A dual modeling approach is employed to describe office documents and support document search and retrieval. The frame templates for representing document classes are organized to form a document type hierarchy. Based on its document type, the synopsis of a document is extracted to form its corresponding frame instance. According to the user predefined criteria, these frame instances are stored in different folders, which are organized as a folder organization (i.e., repository of frame instances associated with their documents). The concept of linking folders establishes filing paths for automatically filing documents in the folder organization. By integrating document type hierarchy and folder organization, the dual modeling approach provides efficient frame instance access by limiting the searches to those frame instances of a document type within those folders which appear to be the most similar to the corresponding queries. This paper presents an agent-based document filing system using folder organization. A storage architecture is presented to incorporate the document type hierarchy, folder organization and original document storage into a three-level storage system. This folder organization supports effective filing strategy and allows rapid frame instance searches by confining the search to the actual predicate-driven retrieval method. A predicate specification is proposed for specifying criteria on filing paths in terms of user predefined predicates for governing the document filing. A method for evaluating whether a given frame instance satisfies the criteria of a filing path is presented. The basic operations for constructing and reorganizing a folder organization are proposed.