A Detailed Description of the EC2M Project: Exploiting Ontologies for the Automatic and Manual Documents Classification in Industrial Enterprise Content Management Systems

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems represent
a crucial aspect in the efficient and effective management of
large-scale enterprises, in particular for those made up of several
sites distributed all over the world. The increasing number of
documents to be managed, the problems related to the sharing
of private information between commercial partners, the need
for semantically describing the contents of shared documents
have pushed researchers to find new techniques and solutions
to deal with these challenges. We already presented the high
level description of a joint project of the Department of Informatics,
Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering of the
University of Genoa, Italy, and two companies, Nacon (member
of Sempla Group, now part of the GFT Group) and Nis, to create
an improved ECM system (named EC2M) exploiting ontologies to
better classify, retrieve and share documentation among different
sites of the involved companies: in this paper, we give a more
detailed description of the project, with respect to its modules
and to the underlying ontology used to classify documents. We
present the automatic documents classification algorithm too,
with an example of its execution. The developed system, which
was born from a real industrial need, is currently used by GFT
Italy to manage and share its documents among more than 600
users distributed in many different geographical locations and,
thanks to the ontology, the semantic tagging process and the
automatic documents forwarding have been successfully achieved.
This joint project proves how a more formal representation of the
documents domain can effectively improve the standard way of
classifying and retrieving documents in real industrial scenarios,
representing a winning collaboration between university and
industry.