Claims
- 1. A method for maintaining a representation of a history of operations performed on documents in a data processing environment comprising:
maintaining a Document Distribution Path representation, the representation including entries that comprise (i) an identifier of one or more source documents, (ii) an identifier of at least one destination document; (iii) a relationship descriptor representative of the manner in which the one or more source documents were used to generate the destination document; sensing access events that possibly affect the relationships between documents, the step of sensing access events being carried out by a monitor process located within an operating system kernel of a user client computer device; in response to sensing an access event in which a new source document is created, or in which a relationship descriptor for an existing document has changed, creating a new entry in the Document Distribution Path representation to reflect the affect of that access event on the history of operations; and if the relationship descriptor cannot be determined from the sensed access event,
querying the destination document against a database of existing documents to determine an appropriate relationship descriptor.
- 2. A method as in claim 1 wherein the Document Distribution Path representation includes other identification of the event, selected from a group consisting of user identification, invoking process identification, network operation identification, and identification of storage media.
- 3. A method as in claim 2 wherein the storage media is removable.
- 4. A method as in claim 1 wherein the Data Distribution Path is represented as a graph having vertices that represent the documents and edges that represent a modification relationship between the documents.
- 5. A method as in claim 3 wherein the edges that represent the modification relationship identify whether the related documents are the same or modified.
- 6. A method as in claim 3, wherein the edges that represent the modification relationship identify a mechanism by which the document was modified.
- 7. A method as in claim 6 wherein the modification is selected from a group consisting of edit, merge, and copy.
- 8. A method as in claim 6, wherein the identification of the mechanism by which the document was modified on the basis of monitoring a user's access to and/or modification events relevant to that document.
- 9. A method as in claim 4, wherein the edges that represent the modification relationship quantify the degree by which the document was modified.
- 10. A method as in claim 1 wherein the Data Distribution Path is used to implement a data security application, and
if the querying step determines that a similar document exists, applying a security classification previously assigned to the similar document to the destination document.
- 11. A method as in claim 10 wherein the monitor process is capable of limiting user access to a document according to its security classification.
- 12. A method as in claim 10 wherein the monitor process is capable of limiting user control over a document according to its security classification.
- 13. A method as in claim 10 wherein the security classification is applied to a new document, in real time as the document is initially stored in the system.
- 14. A method as in claim 1 wherein an initial modification relationship between at least one pair of documents is determined by a degree of similarity between documents.
- 15. A method as in claim 14 wherein the modification relationship is further determined by at least one of their access time or modification time.
RELATED APPLICATION
[0001] This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/442,464 entitled “Method and System for Adaptive Identification and Protection of Proprietary Electronic Information,” filed on Jan. 23, 2003. The entire teachings of the above-referenced application are hereby incorporated by reference.
Provisional Applications (1)
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Number |
Date |
Country |
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60442464 |
Jan 2003 |
US |