Placeless Documents: A document management system that works the way
you do.

Paul Dourish
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
dourish@parc.xerox.com


Traditional document storage systems (including the conventional
filesystems that most of us use) are organised according to the needs
of the system, rather than the requirements of real world document
practices. They rely on hierarchies, when people use more fluid
organisational schemes; they place artificial barriers between
documents from different sources (personal, email, web, etc.); and, by
locking functionality within application black boxes, they make it
hard to adapt system behaviour to evolving work practices.

The Placeless Documents project, based in the Computer Science Lab at
PARC, is exploring new approaches to document management that aim to
address these problems. Our approach is based on the use of document
properties as a uniform mechanism for managing, categorising,
organising, retrieving and manipulating documents. Document properties
capture relationships between people, documents and tasks. In the
Placeless Documents system, properties can also encapsulate executable
code, which can modify or add new document behaviours.

In this talk, I will survey the background and motivations for our
work, and describe the design of the Placeless Documents system. I
will also discuss some of our early application experiences and what
we've learned so far.