ORGANISING AND STORING DOCUMENTS

A data handling device has access to a store of existing metadata pertaining to existing documents having associated metadata terms. It analyses the metadata to generate statistical data as to the co-occurrence of pairs of terms in the metadata of one and the same document. When a fresh document is received, it is analysed to assign to it a set of terms and determine for each a measure of their strength of association with the document. Then, for each term of the set, a score is generated that is a monotonically increasing function of (a) the strength of association with the document and of (b) the relative frequency of co-occurrence of that term and another term that occurs in the set; metadata for the fresh document are then selected as the subset of the terms in the set having the highest scores.