How can Ontologies Support Digital and Paper Archives? A Case Study

Up to some years ago, industries operating in the field of document filing systems had a great boost to their growth, driven, above all, by the need of Public Administrations and of large-scale industries to externalize their paper archives. Now document filing system companies are slowly trying to convert themselves into digital enterprises becoming, de facto, providers of services going far beyond the simple physical provision of space for rental in warehouses: services such as Substitutive Optical Scanning, document indexing, manual data input and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) are now essential. In this context these companies often encounter difficulties facing up to problems more typical of the software engineering field: small several documental production is ever more dependent on their clients’ internal business processes and integrated with their information systems. This makes the clients increasingly subject to the work of external software house to perform every, even little, modification to the implemented systems. In this paper we present a case study: the YouFile service prototype. This system supports smart document (both paper and electronic) indexing. It is based on a WebOS interface in order to benefit from 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 the management of the process of document indexing and retrieval in an automatic way, generating the data entry forms at run-time.