Message files
- 1 January 1983
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM Transactions on Information Systems
- Vol. 1 (1), 88-98
- https://doi.org/10.1145/357423.357429
Abstract
Consider an office information system and the messages which circulate within it. We will assume for the purpose of this paper that the messages are text messages in machine readable form. We are interested in designing a message filing capability which has the following characteristics: 1) It can deal with a wide variety of messages 2) It can retrieve the messages in a flexible manner 3) It provides a simple and uniform interface to the user 4) It can be implemented efficiently for a large volume of messages We define messages as consisting of a header and a body [Kirstein]. The header contains formatted data representing the most important characteristics of the messages, e.g., sender, date, destination, etc. The body is text consisting of a series of words. We will denote by A0, A1,. . . An the attributes of the header. A0 is a special attribute which contains a unique system-wide identifier for the message. The body will be denoted as an attribute B of type text. A particular message will be represented as (a0 ,a1. . . a0, b). All messages do not have to be of the same type. Each type of message, however, is represented by a set of attributes and a body. In the two extreme cases we have the message type (A0,B), i.e., documents and (A0,A1,. . . ,An), i.e., records. Forms as messages can be represented as (A0. . . ,An,B) with the additional stipulation that the values of A's are dispersed within B.Keywords
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