AWOCADO: Using Metadata for Information Retrieval in Intranet-based Document Management Systems

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Description/Abstract

Locating digital documents in modern organisations with the aid of metadata is a challenging area of research in document management/content management systems. Using metadata, i.e. document attributes, associated with the documents substantially improves the efficiency and accuracy of location. The use of metadata, however, is still not easy mainly because of the difficulty in defining and then effectively using such metadata. In order to investigate this, we have built an AWOCADO (Adaptive WOrkflow Controller And Document Organiser) prototype system. AWOCADO provides a framework for defining and managing document attributes and passing documents around the user community as well as locating documents by using their attributes. It can be best described as an enriched internal mailing system combined with a searchable repository. An evaluation study was conducted to observe information retrieval using metadata in our system. We have concluded that AWOCADO’s introduction of flexible metadata management does not fully benefit the document seekers. The need for widening our research area into a recommender and knowledge management systems was recognised.