Balancing Generality and Specificity in Document Management Systems

This paper describes an experiment to extend the reach of the document-centric metaphors of computing to new physical and virtual objects in the workplace. By bringing these entities into the sphere of electronic documents, we leverage users’ knowledge and expectations about how documents work, and also leverage existing tools and applications that understand and manipulate documents. Being able to use general-purpose tools on semantically-loaded content types can be useful, but there are potential pitfalls with the loss of the functionality provided by special-purpose applications. We investigate a solution to this problem that strikes a balance between generality and specificity by allowing application functionality and user interface components to be associated with the document and used by general-purpose applications that operate on that document.