Document archive system

golfdog

Hi all

I am completely new to Aware IM and would appreciate some advice.

I want to build an academic document storage system which works like this:

(1) The author registers, then submits a document.

(2) The author defines the document by attributing various tags to it.

(3) The tags are chosen from existing lists within the storage system.

(4) The author can also create new tags if no suitable ones are available.

(5) Another user can then search for documents by defining his/her search with tags from the existing list in the system.

(6) He/she can also refine the search attributing extra "weighting" to particular tags.

My questions are:

(1) Can this be done with aware IM?

(2) If so, could a novice like me configure/create this application? How complicated would it be?

Any advice would be very gratefully received.

kklosson

This can be done but you would be replicating what SharePoint does right out of the box. I recommend you take the word "search" out of the equation. Once your documents are tagged, you are really just filtering a list. For your purpose, this is better than "search", which infers that the documents are word-indexed or something. The results of such a search are often cluttered with many non-relevant results. So your approach is sound.

The hard part, at least for me since I've not tried it, is to create a device to lookup tags and add them to the filtering criteria. But I believe I could think my way through it.

The tagging system would be similar to what SharePoint calls "enterprise term store", which is controlled. I recommend you also control the term set to some degree. In SP, people can create and add their own tags but those are different that the term store. SP calls the enterprise term store a "taxonomy" and calls user-created tags a "folksonomy". The term store in SP is a hierarchy tree, I am unsure how deep you can go with it. As in SP, consider term sets. Each set is its own tree. For example:

Customer
Service Area
Document Type

Three term sets with their own set of terms (tags). This way a user can perform a very targeted filter to find what they need.

Go for it.

golfdog

Many thanks for that detailed reply KK, I am checking out SP now.