Patent ID: 6990631
Filing Date: 2006-01-24
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A document management apparatus which manages a group of documents stored in a document storage device, the document management apparatus comprising: a first unit generating an operational history record of one of the stored documents of the group every time an operation on said one of the stored documents is performed by a document operation device; a second unit storing the operational history records generated by the first unit; and a third unit determining whether a selected item of the operational history record, stored for a currently processed document among the stored documents, matches with a corresponding item of each of the operational history records, stored for the remaining ones of the stored documents other than the currently processed document, so that the third unit extracts a list of related documents, which are related to the currently processed document, from the remaining ones of the stored documents of the group, based on results of the matching, and wherein the third unit performs the matching between the currently processed document and the remaining ones of the stored documents of the group with respect to at least one item of each operational history record, and wherein the third unit comprises a document relation estimating unit calculating an estimated degree of relation between the currently processed document and each of the remaining ones of the stored documents of the group by a length of operation time period for which a value of an operation time period item of the operational history record of the currently processed document overlaps with a value of a corresponding operation time period item of each of the operational history records of the remaining documents, so that the third unit extracts the list of related documents based on the estimated degrees of relation calculated for the remaining ones of the stored documents.