Storga in the history of administrative computing
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Filing is above all selectively throwing out what is no longer worth keeping, then physically grouping together documents dealing with the same subject, and ordering the various files thus formed to facilitate their retrieval later.
Examples:
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customer files |
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storage in suspended files of administrative data of a company |
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newspaper |
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selection and numbering upon entry into the national archives |
Titles and summaries are a way of allowing the reader to realize with a good probability whether the document will give him the information he is looking for, without having to read the entire document to do so.
Examples:
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abstract title in a scientific publication |
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in a newspaper, introduction to an article moved to the front page |
References make it possible to link other documents dealing with related subjects to a document, without having to physically regroup them.
Examples:
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bibliography in a scientific publication |
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civil status register: in each individual's file, we find the name, date and place of birth of their parents, information which enables each parent's file to be found in the civil status register |
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Indexing is a more mechanical form of referencing, where all the documents in which it appears (or related to the concept) are attached to a keyword (or to a notion).
Examples:
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the terminology index at the end of a book |
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in archeology, list of documents referring to a given pharaoh |
The files allow a more efficient selective acquaintance with the information, by showing each information always in the same place.
The files make it possible to find the file quickly, via a lexicographic classification.
Examples:
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administration files |
Queues consist of storing all documents, or references to documents, requiring special treatment in a specific location. The information we want to find here is 'what is to be processed?'
Examples:
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stacks of files in the administration (all files in the same stack must receive the same treatment) |
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lists of references to be supplied because the quantity is currently too low in stock |
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First, it is the power of the notion of file (in the sense of a set of files) which has been multiplied, due to a new possibility of automated batch processing.
Secondly, the web causes two simultaneous upheavals:
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on the one hand, it multiplies the power of the notion of reference via the introduction of the notion of hyperlink that can be browsed in a fraction of a second; |
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on the other hand it demultiple the power of the notion ofindexation via the introduction of a universal document format, HTML, and a universal transport format, HTTP, which allowed the emergence of global terminological indexes such as search engines. |
Let us now take stock of the limits of current computer science concerning each basic technique.
One of the paradoxes of the success of the web, which imposed a single format, HTML, for documents, and thus allowed the emergence of global indexing, is to have largely failed in the possibility given to everyone to publish on the Web. Today, the average citizen can write and print an office document, send it by email, but not publish it online, an activity still reserved for 'technophiles'.
The rise of social networks is largely linked to this shortcoming, but they are in no way a satisfactory answer because of their specialization in terms of content and the level of interference in private life that they induce.
More than it has changed, the web has quite simply adopted the notion of a summary title, caption photo through 'news' sites whose home page is only a list (possibly disfigured by The advertisement).
The problem from which the concept of hyperlink introduced by the web suffers is its instability over time.
Technically, a hyperlink on the web is roughly formed by the name of the server followed by the name of the file that contains the document referred to by the hyperlink. However, the file name, a concept introduced by Unix also in the 1970s, does not provide for stability over time. If we change the name of one of the directories that contains the document or move it, then the hyperlink is 'broken'.
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At this level, IT is a victim of its technical success. Since the storage capacity increases exponentially over time, no need to sort, throw away: everything is kept as it is. This has two serious consequences:
First of all, in the end, the information gets lost. Indeed, after some time, we know that the information exists, but we no longer know where, and a little later, we no longer even know that it exists. In fact, the motivation to ensure the periodic copying of digital data, technically essential for their conservation, remains low, and the loss, ultimately very significant, is no longer the result of a reasonable choice at all as is the case. case at the level of national archives for example.
Then, the other great advance of the web, namely global terminological indexing, has become a cast on a wooden leg. No more need to classify, since 'Google' will find it. Except that indexing is very effective for finding information associated with rare and well-defined terms, but not for finding any type of information. In addition, it only concerns public information and in the universal format of the web; the myriad file formats and various computer systems used in the internal computing of organizations and individuals technically preclude efficient global indexing and the ability for information to survive the organization or individual that contains it. has generated.
The big problem with files (set of files) that IT has not solved is their rigidity. This translates into three levels.
First of all, the difficulty, or even more radically the inability, for an organization to efficiently use the files from another organization.
Before IT, an internal or external file induced practically the same productivity. Today an internal file will benefit from computer processing, not an external file.
However, because of the productivity contribution offered by IT, the regulations, and therefore the number and complexity of files, have become considerably more complex, so that manual processing becomes impractical. Therefore, the problem arises very concretely when one wants, for example, to consolidate pension funds or to offer citizens a service consolidated between the commercial court, URSSAF, RSI and others.
Then the difficulty for an organization to change its structure of files, therefore adapting the organization of work to new needs.
The relational model introduced in the 1970s and currently at the heart of practically all administrative systems makes it possible very effectively to change the use made of a file system, and it is this quality that has made it necessary, but it does not help at all if we need to change the structure of the files.
Finally, computer databases require extremely precise prior planning, while in most cases it is trial and error and experimentation that alone make it possible to find (and above all to keep) the optimal organization.
In conclusion, to be efficient, computer databases require two conditions:
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an activity that does not change over time, |
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exercised for decades so that the corresponding optimal organization is known in advance. |
It is the email, initially an information exchange tool, which victim of its success has become the single queue of too many individuals, ultimately inducing a loss of productivity due to the technical inability of the email. prioritize and effectively share the workload associated with its treatment.
Let's take a third and last time each basic technique, and see in what form the Storga software offers it.
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Storga offers a document editor that allows you to share them effortlessly, to edit them collaboratively and simultaneously, and ensures perfect traceability.
In addition, any Storga document is also a web page. With Storga, publishing a document on the web is simply making it public.
The Storga user interface offers an 'Organize' mode whose tools are specialized for this function: move, group, store in subfolders, delete.
The fact that a new user does not understand why this mode exists is often a symptom that it still operates on the belief that the exponential capacity over time of digital storage systems has made classification superfluous.
Each Storga document is associated with a title and a summary (and possibly an icon or photo).
Creating the main page of a news site in Storga therefore simply amounts to creating a sub page for each article.
By removing the link between document and Unix files, Storga makes the URL of a document or folder permanent over time, even if it is moved, and thus resolves the technical problem associated with broken hyperlinks on the web.
In other words, with Storga, each document has a unique and permanent reference, as to the national archives.
In Storga, each document is associated with a read and write access right, and indexing takes this into account, so that it is possible for a user to index all of their documentation while preserving the level. desired confidentiality.
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The main characteristic of a Storga file is that it can exist independently and outside of any file, which introduces an unprecedented level of flexibility for computer processing:
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A Storga system, unlike a relational database, is not intended to store just a few well-defined types of records, but all types of records. |
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In fact, when you decide to upgrade a type of file, it is not necessary to migrate the old files: we keep them as they are. |
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Setting up new files does not require programming skills, and is therefore accessible to all executives of an organization. |
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Finally, the reports allow you to filter and sort files that are not all identical: you don't have to organize yourself on the 'I only want to see one head' model. |
Storga offers three queuing systems:
With a classic mailer, each box is a closed environment, or emails can only circulate to the subfolders inside the box.
With Storga, emails can be moved throughout the site, for example in customer files, and conversely, in any area of \u200b\u200bthe site, for example a customer file, you can find all the emails exchanged for n days, whatever regardless of the mailbox concerned.
It is the digital equivalent of a storage bench.
We previously indicated that with Storga, each file exists independently of any file. A Storga report is a particularly powerful document which allows you to find all the records of certain types in a given area of \u200b\u200bthe site, to filter and sort them.
A record can therefore appear in different states, and in fact, for a given set of records, there can be several states, where each one lists the records requiring particular processing and therefore plays the role of a queue. The advantage of Storga is that unlike an organization without IT where you have to physically move the file to put it in the bin associated with the operation to be performed, with Storga, the report is also a automatically create hyperlinks: each line of the report refers to the area of \u200b\u200bthe site where the corresponding file is located.
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Storga's objective is to be the most flexible tool for setting up a dematerialized organization, by offering all the basic techniques in the form of a single coherent software.
For each of these techniques, there are more efficient specialized tools, but their juxtaposition to implement a complete system generally drastically drops overall productivity, and moreover does not adapt well to organizational changes over time.