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Document Management For Research With Annotation?
msimm writes "I'm currently looking for a document management system for personal and research-related use. Having looked at Alfresco and KnowledgeTree along with a slew of similar open source document management systems they seem to have a common set of features including version control, archiving, document permission/ownership and search/indexing. What I'd like, in order to help me manage my own continually growing collection of pdf/doc/odf/rtf/txt files, would be something that allowed me to view and annotate documents (and possibly collaborate/share notes) without requiring me to download, edit and re-upload each document. Obviously there are plenty of capable document management systems out there, so I really suspect I've simply missed something and am hoping someone can point me to a better way to index, search, collaborate and keep and share notes on the ever increasing glut of useful information I seem to use and collect."
if you want a low-tech approach, just install a wiki. Mediawiki is full featured while MoinMoin is easy to install and configure (no separate database needed). I haven't used any others.
Collaborate, in my opinion, implies that there is some advanced messaging going on in the background. And the persistence of that messaging (whether on a centralized server or via some P2P/Client routing protocol) is not only complex but often needs to be specific to what you want to collaborate about. Let's look at annotations. Where are they stored? How am I notified if you add an annotation to my document? How do I track my annotations? How do I share my annotations? Where is that stored? Etc. The questions raised are endless.
A coworker implemented a basic ruby service of this where I work and I have to say that he didn't find any open source alternatives before he started that fulfilled anywhere near what we needed. Ruby made it pretty easy (1 or 2 person job) with the emphasis just being javascript and DOM coding to get the interface correct. Then we just had a RESTful service for storing these and from there we'll keep adding on features like messaging/e-mail alearts/etc for the users when we get time. Yes, I'm aware that if I open sourced this you could help me out with that but I'm sorry, my employer is not on that boat (yet).
For your reference, even just document management is a sticky solution to find in open source, we've talked about it time and time again.
My work here is dung.
I use Papers. It does not do everything you want, but it is a nice management tool. It is still growing in features, and the support staff is very responsive. (They provided me, same day, a new NIB file that allowed me to use it on my small hackintoshed Dell Mini 9 screen.)
The link is here: http://mekentosj.com/papers/
Otherwise, Endnote works well. I know many who use it. There are a few others that are also out there.
Good luck with it.
Zotero may well be what you're looking for. Much better and more open source than EndNote (mentioned above).
You're looking for a reference management system, not a document management system. (although, they might not deal with all of the stuff that you mentioned that a document management system will)
Zotero should work for a single person, but if you're trying to do this for an office, you might want to take a look at Aigaion.
If you want to look at others to see what best fits your needs, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software
And , if you still can't find anything -- try asking on the Code4Lib mailing list, as you might need one of the 'integrated' library solutions.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.