1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to document management. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and system for tag-based document management and access control.
2. Related Art
As the costs of computing power and Internet connectivity become progressively lower, the number of documents a user or organization handles is exploding. At the same time, dramatic drops in storage costs obviate the need to delete those documents. As a result, one often needs to manage and navigate a huge pool of documents to find information.
The sheer number of such documents, and the challenge of finding them easily under a variety of conditions, has prompted a move away from manual document management practices, such as filing of documents in traditional hierarchical file systems. Present document management systems increasingly involve optimized search, which is automatic indexing of the documents and allows fast retrieval based on queries. While such search-based management interfaces are powerful and ameliorate some of the problems engendered by information overload, they do not address a number of concerns.
For example, manual document organization, e.g., copying or moving documents into folders, conveys information about the documents: what documents are related to each other, what documents are relevant to a particular task, etc. Search-based document retrieval makes it difficult for typical users to annotate documents with information implied by their physical organization.
In addition, search-based interfaces do not address many of the other non-organizational functions performed by standard manual organization practices. Particularly, manual organization, e.g., the placement of a file in a given folder or document collection associated with particular properties, is one of the most easily comprehensible and widely used mechanisms for specifying access control policies. Such access control policies specify who is allowed to read, write, or access a given set of documents. While such policies can be applied directly to individual files, in practice it is much more intuitive for a policy to be applied to a collection or folder (e.g., a folder to be shared with a particular group), and documents to be controlled under that policy are simply added to that folder rather than being managed individually.