Acknowledgements

The idea for Docco came when we found a little program called DocSearcher. First we planned on reusing some of this code, but then we figured that the interesting bits are in libraries like Lucene and POI anyway, so we started from scratch.

Besides Lucene and POI we use PDFbox and Multivalent to support other formats. OpenOffice has to be acknowledge for not needing extra tools -- their documents are zipped XML files with a thoughtful structure and thus easy to parse with standard Java tools.

From the user interface point of view Docco was inspired by earlier work on a Conceptual Email Manager developed by Richard Cole with C++/Qt on Linux. Details of the Conceptual Email Manager and a scientific description of the work is to be found in several papers on the site of the KVO group. A good example is Document Retrieval for Email Search and Discovery using Formal Concept Analysis by R.J.Cole, P.W.Eklund and G.Stumme (published in "Applied Artificial Intelligence", Volume 17, Number 3, 2003). A commercial variant of the Conceptual Email Manager can be found as an outlook plugin called Mail-Sleuth.

The work on Docco was financed by the DSTC and used resources of the University of Queensland.