YOUFILE: Ontology based system for document smart indexing

The huge amount of files of different types (from photos, personal documents, to accounting or fiscal documents) which everyone stores in his own personal computer or in other hardware device (such as internet virtual space, external hard drives, etc.) risk, with the passing of time, to go lost. The founding idea of the eSCI project (eStore of Captured Information) is just to avoid the accidental loss of files, proposing to develop a web portal which allows the user to safely store his own documents and to retrieve them whenever he wants through a simple internet connection. Within the scope of this research project, the reached objective was double: first to assist the user in the document indexing activity, leading him to define the right keywords able to univocally characterize each file; in this way the user doesn’t index the document only though its file name but also providing more precise information about its content. This allows to characterize the document according to a semantic meaning which will make its retrieval easier. At the same time, we would develop a software architecture that should be able to automatically generate the right data entry forms needed to index each particular class of documents, avoiding the expensive activities of the evolutive maintenance of the application. We made use of ontologies to express the real semantic value that each document could hide, simplifying their indexing and retrieval.