Hello. I'm one of those people that downloads a lot of articles regularly. I've amassed around a thousand or so articles and photocopied documents. I've found it to be a massive amount of work trying to organize them all, and I think i have spent more time moving files between directories than I have reading them. I was wondering if anyone might have any suggestions/ideas for alternate methods of document organization (involving FOSS, preferably). My first thought was perhaps some system where all the documents were in one directory, but organized in some kind of central database file with meta information and tags and such. But I don't really have any idea of what direction to start looking in. I have a little bit of Perl and C++ coding experience (and some familiarity with MySQL), but I'd be inclined more toward a pre-fabricated solution.

This would take a little bit of work to get correct, but should be workable with a little bit of recoding (its perl). https://gna.org/cookbook/?group=tagsfs I use it on my mp3s, its a pretty neat fuse filesystem. You set it to scan a directory, it writes a sqlLite file (basically mysql written to a flat file, easy if you know mysql), and parses it out to make some directories based on tags from the mp3. My suggestion would be to create a custom sqlLite db and edit the tagfs-mount perl script to use that. Then write some kind of frontend (or if you can write something to categorize your documents even better). It will basically put all your documents in 'virtual' directories that are already sorted. :)

Don't know how helpful this is for your purpose: http://www.linux.com/articles/54790 Then there's leaftag, to tag everything. It's not all automatic but it's still a lot of help in my opinion. http://www.chipx86.com/w/index.php/Leaftag