A method for maintaining document consistency based on similarity contents

The advent of the WWW and distributed information systems have made it possible to share documents between different users and organisations. However, this has created many problems related to the security, accessibility, right and most importantly the consistency of documents. It is important that the people involved have access to the most up-to-date version of the documents, retrieve the correct documents and should be able to update the documents repository in such a way that his or her document are known to others. In this paper we propose a method for organising, storing and retrieving documents based on similarity contents. The method uses techniques based on information retrieval, document summarisation and term extraction and indexing. This methodology is developed for the E-cognos project which aims at developing tools for the management and sharing of documents in the construction domain