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.

This paper illustrates an object-oriented programming environment, called Application Conference Interface (ACI), which has been designed in order to facilitate the implementation of cooperative information systems. It interfaces developers of cooperative applications with services provided by a software platform, called ImagineDesk. The platform offers a rich set of services which can be exploited by developers of cooperative applications in order to manage them, to exchange multimedia data and to control users' interactions according to their roles. Basically, the ACI provides a set of local abstractions of remote services. These abstractions take the form of local objects, hiding the details of the underlying physical network from the application developer. By exploiting the object-oriented paradigm, the ACI clearly confines the host environment and network constraints in few easily upgradable objects, thus resulting in a highly system-independent architecture.

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This paper describes the architecture of a document retrieval system integrating classical IR features with knowledge about the procedural and application context where documents are used.The paper focuses on the query language that allows the user to pose queries involving the analysis of both the semantic network where procedures, office agents, and events of the office context are represented as elements accessing, modifying, filing, manipulating document, and the document contents, i.e. their text.The coupling of the query system with a browser tool is also discussed.The system relies on a knowledge representation model for document and document roles developed in previous phases of the research.

Document classification and retrieval systems for office applications require knowledge management to describe the semantics of documents related to procedural and domain dependent aspects of the office work to be described: operational dependencies, documents relationships and references to regulations and laws are concepts which are not explicitly stated in the text. This paper presents a semantic model for office documents classification and retrieval based on knowledge representation of the office procedural environment and of the application domain. Navigation along knowledge networks for document retrieval and browsing is described.