OFFICE DOCUMENT-RETRIEVAL

Various facets and views of the problems of information retrieval in an office and administrative environments are discussed in this paper. We start considering priorities in automation leading to the requirement of a sound document management in terms of storage of documents as the major information carriers in an organisation, formulation of information needs, and the retrieval of documents. We discuss problems of office information retrieval, taking into account the overall office environment, as well as possibilities for indexing strategies and different forms of query. Finally, text documents are considered in more detail and the concept of information traces is introduced as an indexing and retrieval mechanism to handle natural language documents and fuzzy queries.