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 selects metadata assigned to documents deemed to be of interest to a user and 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, a score is generated for the document, for each term of the set, the score being 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. The score represents the relevance of the document to the users and can be used (following comparison with a threshold, or with the scores of other such documents) to determine whether the document is to be reported to the user, and/or retrieved.