Managing Unstructured and Semi-Structured Information in Organisations

This paper considers software systems for the management of unstructured and semi-structured information in organisations. It catalogues and explains information challenges facing organisations, namely the need to lower barriers to information, to provide better version control and collaboration, to provide more consistent productivity tool functionality and more powerful search capabilities, and to reduce information maintenance costs. It catalogues and discusses current (partial) solutions to these challenges (including file servers, web servers, content and document management systems, wiki webs, portals and databases) and points out their limitations. It describes the characteristics of, and sketches, a more complete solution to these challenges (namely a centralised information repository accessible from a rich client application and from Web browsers, on-line and off-line, that allows easier creation and publishing of information, easier access and collaboration from inside and outside the organisation, finer grain access control, automatic versioning, treats different information similarly and with consistent functionality, full content search, and fine-grained reuse of information).