This section describes a way of managing and searching for documents using Gellish for storing auxiliary information about the documents and about the objects about which the documents provide information. This includes also management and descriptions of drawings and information that is present on various media such as text files, sound, video, etc.

For proper modeling of documents it is important to distinguish between a document as being information and the physical document, being a carrier of the information. The concept ‘document’ is defined in Gellish as information that is presented in one or more physical information carriers. An information carrier can be for example ink on paper, optical or electronic patterns on media, etc. In other words, information is the common content of information carriers that present the same content.
A particular piece of information that can be presented on more than one different physical carrier is called 'qualitative information'. For example, a particular document (a piece of qualitative information) may exist in doc file format as well as in pdf file format, as well as in printed form. This illustrates that the qualitative information is the common content of all those information carriers (physical files and paper). Thus the qualitative information is distinguished from the physical information carriers that present the information.
Qualitative information can be included in a Gellish in two ways: as a text string that is the description of an “information object” or by a reference to a physical file or object that contains the information. The next paragraphs describes both ways.

Every object (denoted by a UID) is normally related to two text strings: a name and a description (which may be a definition). A name is maximally 255 characters long (Unicode, nvarchar(255)). A description has an unlimited length (Unicode, ntext) in Gellish, although an application system might impose a field length limitation. A piece of qualitative information can be expressed as a description of an information object that represents the piece of qualitative information. For example, an object with the name 'Paragraph 3.1'. That description shall be provided on the line that specifies what kind of information it is. Thus on the line in a Gellish expression table that specifies that the qualitative information is a qualitative subtype of some kind of information.
For example, assume paragraph 3.1 from a document about road design expresses a requirement for motorways. That document is decomposed in fragments that are expressed a Gellish so that the knowledge can be made available for designers of roads. Then the semantic network will contain the following expressions:

Note that the paragraph has a name (Paragraph 3.1), whereas the content of the paragraph is specified in the description of the object on the line where it is qualified as a requirement (idea 211).

In order to facilitate searching and retrieval of documents via the objects about which they provide information it is recommended that the objects about which a document provides information are related to the documents. When those objects are part of a larger assembly it is recommended that the objects are integrated in an integrated model, resulting in integrated information. This will then enable searching and retrieval of documents as well as data about the objects.
For example, the fact that motorway M1 is documented on drawing T-12345 is expressed in Gellish as follows:

Often pieces of information consist of complete documents or do not only contain (Unicode) text, such as drawings, sound or video. In those cases the document will usually be an electronic data file in some file format. For example, a drawing might be in AutoCAD dwg file format and may also be expressed in tiff and pdf format. In those cases the physical document (files) are not included themselves in the Gellish Database, but are stored in external files, whereas the Database contains references to the external files or to other physical objects.
For example, drawing T-12345 is scanned and after that the resulting tiff file is converted into a 002.pdf file. The pdf file is stored in the root directory of the C drive of the computer. Then the Gellish Database will show the following facts:

The original mastercopy my be a sheet of paper that is located in archive A. The additional facts that describe that are expressed as follows:

Gellish powered software shall have the following capabilities:

1. Recognize any object that is classified as an ‘electronic data file’.
2. Determine the file type of such an object from the file extension (or from the value of an aspect that is classified as a file format).
3. Determine the collection of files that is classified as a directory.
4. Determine the location of the directory from the name of the collection.
5. Launch the appropriate application that opens the file for viewing or editing.

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