Extending document management systems with user-specific active properties

Paul Dourish, W. Keith Edwards, Anthony LaMarca, John Lamping, Karin Petersen, Michael Salisbury, Douglas B. Terry, James Thornton
2000 ACM Transactions on Information Systems  
Document properties are a compelling infrastructure on which to develop document management applications. A property-based approach avoids many of the problems of traditional hierarchical storage mechanisms, reflects document organizations meaningful to user tasks, provides a means to integrate the perspectives of multiple individuals and groups, and does this all within a uniform interaction framework. Document properties can reflect not only categorizations of documents and document use, but
more » ... lso expressions of desired system activity, such as sharing criteria, replication management and versioning. Augmenting property-based document management systems with active properties that carry executable code enables the provision of document-based services on a property infrastructure. The combination of document properties as a uniform mechanism for document management, and active properties as a way of delivering document services, represents a new paradigm for document management infrastructures. The Placeless Documents system is an experimental prototype developed to explore this new paradigm. It is based on the seamless integration of user-specific, active properties. We present the fundamental design approach, explore the challenges and opportunities it presents, and show how our architecture deals with them.
doi:10.1145/348751.348758 fatcat:v6gl56ojfvagvljwsbqaiwgqji