Method and system for document lineage tracking

A method for document lineage tracking, comprising the steps of:

• providing an electronic computing device having an electronic file system within a memory of the electronic computing device and a hash value generator to produce instructions for a processing unit;
• identifying a document and associated metadata having data fields including a field for storage of a hash value representing a similar document;
• detecting a document action regarding said document with said hash value generator;
• reading information from said data fields and content from said document with said hash value generator;
• creating a current hash value from said document data fields and content, wherein said current hash value is associated with a state of said document at a specific time;
• writing said current hash value to at least one of said data fields to memorialize said state of said document;
• providing a near duplicate analyzer to produce instructions for said processing unit;
• reading content from said document with said near duplicate analyzer;
• creating a data representation from said content;
• comparing said data representation to previously stored data representations created from content of other documents;
• generating a similarity metric quantifying the similarity between said created data representation and a second data representation;
• and
• writing a hash value associated with said document from which said second data representation was created when said similarity metric exceeds a predetermined threshold.