Connections: using context to enhance file search

  • Authors:
  • Craig A. N. Soules;Gregory R. Ganger

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University;Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twentieth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Connections is a file system search tool that combines traditional content-based search with context information gathered from user activity. By tracing file system calls, Connections can identify temporal relationships between files and use them to expand and reorder traditional content search results. Doing so improves both recall (reducing false-positives) and precision (reducing false-negatives). For example, Connections improves the average recall (from 13% to 22%) and precision (from 23% to 29%) on the first ten results. When averaged across all recall levels, Connections improves precision from 17% to 28%. Connections provides these benefits with only modest increases in average query time (2 seconds), indexing time (23 seconds daily), and index size(under 1% of the user's data set).