A formal approach to modeling office information systems

This paper formally specifies a document model for office information systems, including formal definitions of document types (frame templates), a document type hierarchy, folders, and folder organizations. Folder Organizations are defined using predicates and directed graphs. A Reconstruction Problem for folder organizations is then formulated; viz., under what circumstances it is possible to reconstruct a folder organization from its folder level predicates. The Reconstruction Problem is solved in terms of such graph-theoretic concepts as Associated Digraphs, transitive closure, and redundant/nonredundant filing paths. A Transitive Closure Inversion algorithm is then presented which efficiently recovers a Folder Organization digraph from its Associated Digraph.