Accommodating Paper in Document Databases

Although the paperless office has been imminent for decades, documents in paper form continue to be used extensively in almost all organizations. Present-day information systems are designed on the premise that any paper document in use will be either converted into electronic form or merely printed from electronic file(s) accessible to the system. Yet, paper is the medium of choice in many situations, mainly owing to its portability and usability, and the medium of necessity in others, especially where external communica-tion or the traditional notion of authenticity are involved. Humans who find unique attractive features in both paper and electronic forms of documents, must survive this tension between the de-jure banishment of paper and its de-facto prevalence. In this paper, we propose to make paper doc-uments first-class citizens by including them in the model underlying the information system. Specifically, we extend the schema of a document database with the notion of paper documents, physical locations, and the organizational hier-archy. This leads to an overall enhancement of document integrity and the ability to answer queries such as “where are the customer complaint letters we have received today?” and “which documents are in this filing cabinet?”. Recent technological advances such as sensors have made the im-plementation of such a model very realistic