FLYINGDOC: an architecture for distributed, user-friendly, and personalized information systems

The need for personal information management using distributed, user-friendly, and personalized document management systems is obvious. State of the art document management systems such as digital libraries provide support for the whole document lifecycle. To enhance such document management systems to get a personalized, distributed and user-friendly information system we present techniques for a simple import of collections, documents, and data, for generic and concrete data modeling, replication, and, personalization. These techniques were employed for the implementation of a personal conference assistant, which was used for the first time at the VLDB conference 2003 in Berlin, Germany. Our client-server architecture provides an information server with different services and different kinds of clients. These services comprise a distribution and replication service, a collection integration service, a data management unit, and, a query processing service.