A desktop interface over distributed document repositories

The demonstration is devoted to the desktop-level interactions offered by Cador, a content-based document management system currently under development. Cador provides a rule-based language to query and manipulate large collections of documents distributed in repositories. The language is able to define the content of Virtual File Systems (VFS) as views over the document collections. This feature allows users to combine their familiar interface and desktop-based softwares with the powerful search and transformation tools provided by the underlying system.

The demonstration shows how VFS views can be created on-demand to present a desktop-based virtual document organization and how standard desktop interactions can be captured and interpreted in terms of document management operations: creation, updates, annotation, derivation of new content thanks to transformation rules, sharing between users, etc. The example application is the management of a large bibliographic database: users can, with a few clicks, organize their bibliographic references, import new references, share them with a group of co-authors and automatically maintain a ready-to-use Bibtex file.