Concepts as knowledge handles in collaborative document management

With the increasing availability of electronic documents, it is essential that people can navigate through document spaces for information effectively through an index, in a collaborative manner. We describe a system that supports the collaborative construction of indexes of concepts rather than terms. In a concept index, a concept can be described by more than one term, phrase, arbitrary text piece, and other concepts. These concepts can be structured and associated with one another without strict restrictions. Software agents work in the background to find occurrences of concepts in a document collection, enabling users to navigate documents based on concepts. Users can extract concepts by simply highlighting pieces of text while browsing documents. Through collaborative index construction, a user benefits from contributions of other users, and the system enables a group of users to collaboratively manage information.