Opus2 Platform is designed to allow users to work effectively with documents. This covers a wide range of use cases from simply uploading documents into a convenient storage location where they can be viewed, to complex workflows around the lifecycle of a document including organising them into file hierarchies or collections, applying metadata, replacing documents as newer versions become available and selectively sharing them with specific groups or individuals.
In order to support this diversity of use cases, Opus 2 Platform adopts a model which is common in review and discovery tools. The central concepts of the model address the distinction between three related concepts:
A "document": typically a body of text written by an individual and perhaps subsequently edited through different versions, but the term "document" is also used to cover other types of content such as audio, video, presentations or spreadsheets.
Metadata associated with a document, comprising both original metadata such as the author and creation date, and further metadata applied to it within the application such as tags, or text.
The electronic file or files that provide a viewable representation of the document.
Often for simple use cases there is a one to one correspondence between files and documents. In these cases Opus 2 Platform is designed to allow the user to ignore these distinctions and just upload, view and annotate "documents".
For other use cases, there may be multiple files associated with a document. A document may have been printed and subsequently scanned producing one file. Then optical character recognition is run on the file to produce a new one with a selectable text overlay. Or maybe the document was presented in court and the paper version was stamped with the data of presentation. If this is then scanned, there will be another version of the same document.
In general, there may be a linear sequence of files associated with any document. There may also be files in Platform that are not (yet) associated with any document. This supports a "serviced" use model where a review team are working with the documents in a project and in parallel a support team may be uploading new files. The support team have the option of uploading the files without connecting them to any document so that they can check that the files are correctly processed before making them available to the review team.
The following terms are used with specific meanings in this documentation when referring to Opus 2 Platform documents:
File: an electronic file uploaded to Opus 2 Platform.
Ingestion: the process of making a file ready to view and work within Opus 2 Platform. For files with text content this involves extracting the text, extracting any available metadata from the file, possibly running OCR on it if necessary, and generating thumbnails of each page.
Document: a container for a single "conceptual" document holding metadata and a list of the associated electronic files.
Publishing: starting with a file and creating a document in Opus 2 Platform with that file as its only associated electronic file.
Versions: the sequence of files associated with a document.
Replacement: the process of adding another electronic file to the list of files associated with a document. This makes the new file the principal version of that document - the one that is shown by default when a user views a document.
Files in Opus 2 Platform are relatively simple. They are uploaded, ingested, and thereafter they are immutable. Nothing can be changed about a file. No further ingestion products are added. The only thing that can be done is that the file is deleted. Files have associated metadata such as the file type, size, creation date, whether it has readable text, the duration of media files. This is also all immutable.