Snippets and component-based authoring tools for reusing and connecting documents

This paper presents the Snippet System, a new operating system environment that aims at providing enhanced document management facilities. For this, the proposed system utilizes a novel document model based on finer-grained entities, so-called Snippets. These support Relations, which capture the context of individual document excerpts. Snippets furthermore enable a flexible reuse of documents, i.e., user-defined excerpts can be included in several other documents with only selected properties remaining synchronized between different instances. Moreover, dedicated mechanisms allow for the efficient retrieval of these instances and thus support the user in keeping track of reused excerpts and synced properties. The Snippet System relies on a component-based authoring tool architecture that enables different authoring tools to collaborate for handling documents. This allows for combining the contents created by various tools in a single document, independently of the type of content and tools involved, thus making possible the reuse of documents and the definition of Relations across tool boundaries.