Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-08-31
2001-07-24
Feild, Joseph H. (Department: 2176)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06266682
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The following applications are related to the present invention: U.S. Ser. No. 09/143,802, Anthony G. LaMarca, et al., entitled USER LEVEL ACCESSING OF LOW-LEVEL COMPUTER SYSTEM OPERATIONS, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/143,851, Karin Petersen, et al., entitled PROPERTY-BASED USER LEVEL DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/143,778, Douglas B. Terry, et al., entitled A PROPERTY-BASED MECHANISM FOR FLEXIBLY SUPPORTING FRONT-END AND BACK-END COMPONENTS HAVING DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/144,143, Warren K. Edwards, et al., entitled ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR DOCUMENTS, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/143,555, Michael P. Salisbury, et al, entitled VIRTUAL DOCUMENTS, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/144,383, John O. Lamping, et al, entitled SELF CONTAINED DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT BASED ON DOCUMENT PROPERTIES, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 9/143,773, James D. Thornton, et al., entitled SERVICE INTERACTION USING PROPERTIES ATTACHED TO DOCUMENTS, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/144,231, James P. Dourish, et al., entitled ACTIVE PROPERTIES FOR DYNAMIC SYSTEM CONFIGURATION, Pending; U.S. Ser. No. 09/143,777, Warren K. Edwards, et al., entitled EXTENDING APPLICATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH DOCUMENT PROPERTIES; U.S. Ser. No. 09/143,772, Michael P. Salisbury, et al., entitled MAINTAINING DOCUMENT IDENTITY ACROSS FILE SYSTEM INTERFACES, Pending. Each of the above applications filed Aug. 31, 1998 and assigned to a common assignee are hereby incorporated by reference.
The present invention is directed to document management systems. It finds particular application to a system and method which inserts tags in file paths to define a dynamic collection of related files and will be described with particular reference thereto.
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 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 spellchecker 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 server interfaces and supports useful functionality including collections, versioning, renditions, and multiple-repository search. A look at the APIs show that DMA objects (documents) can have properties attached to them. The properties are strongly typed in DMA and must be chosen from a limited set (string, int, date . . . ). To allow for rich kinds of properties, one of the allowable property types is another DMA object. A list type is allowed to build up big properties. Properties have a unique IDs in DMA. Among the differences which exist to the present invention, is the properties are attached to documents without differentiation about which user would like to see them; properties are stored in the document repository that provides the DMA interface, not independently from it. Similarly, DMA does not provide support for active properties.
WebDAV is another interface designed to allow an extended uniform set of functionality to be attached with documents available through a web server. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP 1.1 protocol that allow Web clients to create and edit d
Dourish James P.
Edwards Warren K.
LaMarca Anthony G.
Salisbury Michael P.
Fay Sharpe Fagan Minnich & McKee LLP
Feild Joseph H.
Xerox Corporation
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