Method and system for managing personally identifiable information and sensitive information in an application-independent manner

摘要

Methods and systems are provided for managing personally identifiable and/or sensitive information (PII/SI) in a manner that is independent of a software application that is used for creating or editing a document containing the PII/SI. PII/SI in a document is marked or flagged in an application-independent manner so that a solution application programmed to discover and process marked PII/SI may readily discover the marked information for redacting the information, editing the information, or otherwise disposing of the information as desired. PII/SI in documents may be annotated according to the Extensible Markup Language (XML). A separate XML namespace may be used to distinguish the annotated PII/SI from other content in the document. An application-independent solution may be built for scanning a given document for all annotated information belonging to the namespace associated with the PII/SI. Once the annotated information is located in a given document, it may be redacted, edited, or otherwise processed or disposed of as desired.