Knowledge-based document retrieval in office environments

Abstract

In the office environment, the retrieval of documents is performed using the concepts contained in the documents, information about the procedural context where the documents are used, and information about the regulations and laws that discipline the life of documents within a given application domain. To fulfill the requirements of such a sophisticated retrieval, we propose a document retrieval model and system based on the representation of knowledge describing the semantic contents of documents, the way in which the documents are managed by procedures and by people in the office, and the application domain where the office operates. The article describes the knowledge representation issues needed for the document retrieval system and presents a document retrieval model that captures these issues. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by describing a system, named Kabiria , built on top of such model. The article describes the querying and browsing environments, and the architecture of the system.