Document access in a multi-party information management system

A multi-party information management system such as an electronic contract system deals with a large number of secure documents for many organizations. The access and retrieval of these documents for different organizational users are very complex. In this paper, we present a sequencing access model, that dictates who and when a given version of a document can be retrieved, viewed and acted upon along multi-party workflow processes. To effectively implement the access model, a novel counter-based access algorithm has been proposed to provide dynamic tracking of access privileges and priorities for different organizations participating in the workflows. To support secure search and retrieval of documents, a secure-indexing mechanism has been introduced to incorporate document access control information directly into search index. Using an XML-based search engine and a compound query generation technique to combine user role and organization information in search query, high-performance retrieval has been achieved very securely and efficiently in our information management system.