Confluence: enhancing contextual desktop search

ABSTRACT

We present Confluence, an enhancement to a desktop file search tool called Confluence which extracts conceptual relationships between files by their temporal access patterns in the file system. A limitation of a purely file-based approach is that as file operations are increasingly abstracted by applications, their correlation to a user's activity weakens and thereby reduces the applicability of their temporal patterns. To deal with this problem, we augment the file event stream with a stream of window focus events from the UI layer. We present 3 algorithms that analyze this new stream, extracting the user's task information which informs the existing Confluence algorithms. We present results and conclusions from a preliminary user study on Confluence.

REFERENCES

• 1: Susan Dumais , Edward Cutrell , JJ Cadiz , Gavin Jancke , Raman Sarin , Daniel C. Robbins, Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860451]
• 2: D. Karger, K. Bakshi, D. Huynh, D. Quan, and V. Sinha. Haystack: A General Purpose Information Management Tool for End Users of Semistructured Data. In CIDR '05, pages 13--26, 2005.
• 3: Craig A. N. Soules , Gregory R. Ganger, Connections: using context to enhance file search, Proceedings of the twentieth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 23-26, 2005, Brighton, United Kingdom

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
experimentation, human factors