Introduction

Abstract

Information in an office environment is kept in documents. Documents may be text-oriented documents (such as letters, memoranda, electronic mail, reports, etc.) or non-text-oriented documents (such as images, graphics, audio and video data, etc.). The purpose of office information processing systems is to support office workers in their management of information and documents. TEXPROS (TEXt PROcessing System) [171] is a personal intelligent filing and retrieval oriented office information processing system which focuses on text-oriented documents, and has the following major features:

• A state-of-the-art data model capable of capturing the behavior of the various office activities [106, 107, 108, 170].

• Extracting the synopsis or the most significant information from a document (such information is often sufficient to satisfy the user’s needs when information retrieval occurs) [61, 62, 175].

• A knowledge-based, customizable document classification handler that exploits both spatial and textual analysis to identify the type of a document [21, 22, 60, 61, 62, 147, 174, 175].

• An agent-based architecture supporting document filing and file reorganization [143, 168, 169, 189].

• A retrieval system that can handle incomplete and vague queries [90, 91, 92, 93, 94].