The snippet system - Reusing and connecting documents

This paper presents the Snippet System, a new operating system environment that aims at providing enhanced document management facilities. For this, the proposed system utilizes a novel document model based on finer-grained entities, so-called Snippets. These support Relations, which capture the context of individual document excerpts. Snippets furthermore enable a flexible reuse of documents, i.e., user-defined excerpts can be included in several other documents with only selected properties remaining synchronized between different instances. Moreover, dedicated mechanisms allow for the efficient retrieval of these instances and thus support the user in keeping track of reused excerpts and synced properties. While the Snippet System's concepts extend into the application and user interface layers, this paper focuses in particular on the design and prototypical implementation of its document model, describing how the reuse of document excerpts, the synchronization and retrieval of their different instances, and Relations are supported in a natural and scalable way.