Documents versus contextual information

Well.. Let me start by asking for your needs. If you say that its for legal purposes and is to be used for documentation together with a digital signature or strictly for printing I would tend to suggest the document approach. I any other case I would recommend storing you information in a contextual manner.

A document is basically a black box where you can dump your data. You can find your data by a folderpath and a filename. Thats basically what metadata you get for your document. For me I might as well put the document straight in the trashcan because I know I won't be able to find the document when I need it in a month when there are several versions of the document and a lot of documents have been written since.

The contextual information is different. I'm in particullar thinking of wikis. Here information is normalised to its 3rd degree, not being repeated. When you need the information somewhere you just make a reference to it.

It's an uneven match. Is your information to be used or are they just to be archived.