A document management system

In this paper, a document management system under development is discussed. Besides conventional relational database functions and word processing capabilities (a spell checker, a word index generator), the following functions are required. (1) History of documents, including merging and splitting of documents, must be handled. (2) The correspondences between two consecutive documents can be detected, so that the influence of changes on one document to the other can be calculated. (3) Since there may be a lot of similar documents, data compression facility is required. (4) Powerful retrieval functions as well as a user friendly interface are required. Especially, handling of time and versions is important. (5) Besides retrieval functions, we need functions to identify required documents among a set of candidate documents. (6) In order to handle related documents, a new authorization mechanism must be developed.