Self-maintained folder hierarchies as document repositories

This paper presents a novel approach for the management of large collections of electronic documents. The major technical contribution of our approach is the seamless integration of features found in systems such as file systems, document repositories, directory services, classification hierarchies, and email folders into a single folder-based system. The user may specify rules for characterizing interesting or relevant document classes. Based on these rules which are checked for consistency, folders are not only populated with documents, but folders themselves are created and deleted based on the occurrence of values in documents.