How can ontologies support enterprise digital and paper archives? A case study

Up to some years ago, industries operating in the field of document filing system had a great boost to their growing, pulled, above all, by the need of the Public Administrations and of the Great Industries to externalize their paper archives. Now these companies are slowly trying to convert themselves to digital enterprises becoming, de facto, provider of services going very far from the simple physical space rental in a warehouse: services as Substitutive Optical Scan, document indexing, manual data input, OCR are now essential. In this context these companies are often in difficulty having to face up problems more typical of the software engineering field: small several documental production are more and more dependent on their clients’ internal business processes and integrated with their information systems. This makes them more and more subject to the work of external software house to perform every, even little, modification to the implemented systems. In this paper we presents a case study: the YouFile service prototype. The system supports smart document (both paper and electronic) indexing. It is based on a WebOS interface in order to benefit of the desktop metaphor, and it uses an ontological approach that defines not only the document classes but also the semantic relationships between specific characteristics of each document class. The system allows to manage the process of the document indexing and retrieving in an automatic way, generating the data entry forms at run-time.