After years of building the same thing over and over again to model a database to store documents with their meta-data or purchasing extremely expensive solutions such as Documentum, ImageNow, or Filenet, we have yet to see an easy to use web-service solution to store and retrieve documents. There are other alternatives in the CMS space such as the open-source system Alfresco, but their document storage solution is more of a add-on and not as configurable at the meta-data layer as we needed. We thought it would be nice if you had a system that could be started up with a little configuration and all of a sudden we have applications that can store/retrieve documents with meta-data that can be searched on, modified, validated and secured.

There are many systems out there that integrate with other products such as SharePoint, but many of them being closed source solutions lack the extensibility we want. Any time you start looking for a solution and you can’t find a price on their website, you know the price is going to be cost prohibitive for smaller companies or start-ups.

Monument is not trying to be a full blown CMS. There are better products for providing this functionality, such as Alfresco. Instead Monument is really just trying to provide a way for documents to be stored, organized, searched, and retrieved. If some type of document workflow needs to be built around the documents, this can be provided outside the system by the developers custom code.

Monument does not provide any kind of client. Instead, web-based clients can be written to interact with the web-service calls. A web client for managing some of the system setup will exist.

Monument will not provide scanning capabilities that can be easily provided by other off-the-shelf systems such as Kofax. However, Kofax could be configured to upload documents into the system.

• REST based web-service

• Document storage with meta-data.

• Document level security

  • Authentication provided by pluggable authentication modules

  • Authorization configured via document authorization model

• Document importing and validation

  • File validation (size and type)

  • Image resizing and resampling

  • Auto extract of data from images such as EXIF attributes

  • Configurable allowed image types

  • Duplicate document identification

• Document retention policies

  • Configurable per document or class

  • Staged deletion

• Document encryption

• Document versioning

• Document auditing

• Meta-data structuring, security and validation

• Fast meta-data and textual document searching

• Storage of documents on different storage devices (Local Storage/Network Storage/S3)

Given that imaging systems are typically used to store information for long periods of time, we are following a convention of naming our data types based on historical nouns. This gives clear separation of monument from other imaging systems and provides a clear and concise set of terms that can be used when discussing features. A clear difference can be immediately seen just by understanding that in monument a collection of meta-data with an image is named a Pyx versus a Document in most other systems. Please refer to the terminology document for more terms.

• Terminology

• Documents

• Security

Written in Java Monument benefits by leveraging many open source libraries to perform its functions. Some of the libraries that it uses are:

• Apache Commons Imaging

  • Helping with EXIF data and some image imports

• Java Image IO + TwelveMonkeys

  • Image Import Libraries

• iText or PDFBox

  • Parsing PDFs

• Apache POI

  • Parsing Office Docs and Spreadsheets

• Tesseract-ocr

  • optical character recognition of images

• imgscalr

  • image manipulation