Jyväskylä Studies in Computing 37 Contextual and Structural Metadata in Enterprise Document Management Contextual and Structural Metadata in Enterprise Document Management Jyväskylä Studies in Computing 37 Contextual and Structural Metadata in Enterprise Document Management University of Jyväskylä

Lyytikäinen, Virpi Contextual and structural metadata in enterprise document management Documents have a central role in organizations. While the amount of information continually increases, new kinds of methods for managing the documents are needed. Enterprise document management concerns the whole life cycle of documents in organizations, from emergence to disposition, and also development of document management solutions. The utilization of metadata describing documents has been seen as an answer to the problems of finding relevant and avoiding irrelevant information. Previous research on metadata has commonly concentrated on defining appropriate metadata for document instances. This thesis is, however, focused on metadata related to collections of documents. The thesis emphasizes contextual and structural metadata of document collections. Information about the context where documents are produced or used is called contextual metadata. In the thesis, however, contextual metadata refers only to document production context. Structural metadata, on the other hand, describes the logical structure of the documents by document type definitions or schemas. The thesis describes methods and techniques for collecting and using the metadata. The methods and techniques were developed and tested in three projects in three case environments. The results of the thesis show how contextual and structural metadata can be collected and utilized in document analysis, user requirements elicitation and information retrieval. An example of a contextual metadata schema in XML format is also included. In the future, security issues, like access rights, could be included in the metadata definition.