Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-08-31
2001-07-31
Alam, Hosain T. (Department: 2172)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06269380
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The inventors have recognized that a large amount of a user's interaction with a computer has to do with document management, such as storing, filing, organizing and retrieving information from numerous electronic documents. These documents may be found on a local disc, on a network system file server, an e-mail file server, the world wide web, or a variety of other locations. Modern communication delivery systems have had the effect of greatly increasing the flow of documents which may be incorporated within a user's document space, thereby increasing the need for better tools to visualize and interact with the accumulated documents.
The present invention is directed to a document management system having a distributed document infrastructure where documents are organized and managed in terms of properties attached to documents. The invention is particularly concerned with mechanisms for unifying the instructions received from a variety of sources having different protocols, and unifying the presentation of data retrieved from a variety of storage repositories having different protocols. Such mechanisms allow for manipulation of documents within the document management system in a simplified manner, not requiring users to understand specific characteristics of a plurality of different applications and/or storage repositories which interact with the document management system. The mechanisms further remove the need for the user and/or documents to know where the contents of documents were retrieved.
Instruction input and data collection mechanisms have been implemented in the area of document management, however, various shortcomings exist. For example, for existing data management, if a user wishes to generate a collection of documents from different locations, such as a file system, an e-mail server, the World Wide Web (WWW), or other systems having distinct storage protocols, there is no easy direct manner to obtain such a collection. There is no unified system to issue requests for these documents and no unified system to retrieve the contents of these documents from the distinct storage repositories (i.e., it would be necessary to use different applications to initiate requests to retrieve documents existing in distinct systems and to access the different storage repositories). Thus, no common document layer is provided in the document management area wherein simple interaction between documents from distinct systems is possible.
To obtain such a collection in existing systems, a user needs to implement a variety of search and retrieval mechanisms simply to obtain the documents. Thereafter, once the documents are retrieved the user needs to reformat the documents (if even possible) into ones having similar protocols.
The present invention intends to overcome these deficiencies with a document management system which includes a common document layer where a user has the ability to issue requests for documents from systems having different protocols. The document management system includes a mechanism for unifying the receipt of requests for such distinct documents and a retrieval mechanism for unifying the retrieval of the contents for such distinct documents. This system thereby allows for the generation of collections from a variety of storage hierarchies with different protocols in an easy and efficient manner for a user who is unaware of the location from which the document contents were retrieved.
The most common tools for organizing a document space rely on a single fundamental mechanism known as hierarchical storage systems, wherein documents are treated as files that exist in directories or folders, which are themselves contained in other directories, thereby creating a hierarchy that provides the structure for document space interactions. Each directory in a hierarchy of directories, will commonly contain a number of individual files. Typically, files and directories are given alpha-numeric, mnemonic names in large storage volumes shared via a network. In such a network, individual users may be assigned specific directories.
A file located in a sub-directory is located by its compound path name. For example, the character string D:\TREE\LIMB\BRANCH\TWIG\LEAF.FIL could describe the location of a file LEAF.FIL whose immediate directory is TWIG and which is located deep in a hierarchy of files on the drive identified by the letter D. Each directory is itself a file containing file name, size, location data, and date and time of file creation or changes.
Navigation through a file system, to a large degree, can be considered as navigation through semantic structures that have been mapped onto the file hierarchy. Such navigation is normally accomplished by the use of browsers and dialog boxes. Thus, when a user traverses through the file system to obtain a file (LEAF.FIL), this movement can be seen not only as a movement from one file or folder to another, but also as a search procedure that exploits features of the documents to progressively focus on a smaller and smaller set of potential documents. The structure of the search is mapped onto the hierarchy provided by the file system, since the hierarchy is essentially the only existing mechanism available to organize files. However, documents and files are not the same thing.
Since files are grouped by directories, associating a single document with several different content groupings is cumbersome. The directory hierarchy is also used to control the access to documents, with access controls placed at every node of the hierarchy, which makes it difficult to grant file access to only one or a few people. In the present invention, separation of a document's inherent identity from its properties, including its membership in various document collections, alleviates these problems.
Other drawbacks include that existing hierarchical file systems provide a “single inheritance” structure. Specifically, files can only be in one place at a time, and so can occupy only one spot in the semantic structure. The use of links and aliases are attempts to improve upon such a limitation.
Thus, while a user's conception of a structure by which files should be organized may change over time, the hierarchy described above is fixed and rigid. While moving individual files within such a structure is a fairly straightforward task, reorganizing large sets of files is much more complicated, inefficient and time consuming. From the foregoing it can be seen that existing systems do not address a user's need to alter a file structure based on categories which change over time. At one moment a user may wish to organize the document space in terms of projects, while at some time in the future the user may wish to generate an organization according to time and/or according to document content. A strict hierarchical structure does not allow management of documents for multiple views in a seamless manner resulting in a decrease in the efficiency of document retrieval.
Existing file systems also support only a single model for storage and retrieval of documents. This means a document is retrieved in accordance with a structure or concepts given to it by its author. On the other hand, a user who is not the author may wish to retrieve a document in accordance with a concept or grouping different from how the document was stored.
Further, since document management takes place on a device having computational power, there would be benefits to harnessing the computational power to assist in the organization of the documents. For example, by attaching a spell-checker property to a document, it can extend the read operation of a document so that the content returned to the requesting application will be correctly spelled.
The inventors are aware that others have studied the area of document management/storage systems.
DMA is a proposed standard from AIIM designed to allow document management systems from different vendors to interoperate. The DMA standard covers both client and serve
Dourish James P.
Edwards Warren K.
LaMarca Anthony G.
Lamping John O.
Petersen Karin
Alam Hosain T.
Colbert Ella
Fay Sharpe Fagan Minnich & McKee LLP
Xerox Corporation
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