A Method for Searching Keyword-Lacking Files Based on Interfile Relationships

Abstract

Abstract. Current information technologies require file systems to contain so many files that searching for desired files is a major problem. To address this problem, desktop search tools using full-text search techniques have been developed. However, those files lacking any given keywords, such as picture files and the source data of experiments, cannot be found by tools based on full-text searches, even if they are related to the keywords. It is even harder to find files located in different directories from the files that include the keywords. In this paper, we propose a method for searching for files that lack keywords but do have an association with them. The proposed method derives relationship information from file access logs in the file server, based on the concept that those files opened by a user in a particular time period are related. We have implemented the proposed method, and evaluated its effectiveness by experiment. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method is capable of searching keyword-lacking files and has superior precision and recall compared with full-text and directorysearch methods.

Relationship extraction methods based on co-occurrence in web pages and files

“…We have previously proposed methods for using file-access logs to analyze relationships between files to search for related files in the absence of keywords [17,14,13,15,19]. We analyzed the timing overlaps between file accesses from the file-access logs, and combined this with a full-text search engine [17].…”

“…Some file servers, such as Samba, have a built-in function for maintaining the file-access log that can be used in this approach [17]. In this paper, we use a tool called FaccLog [3] that operates on a file server to maintain more detailed logs, particularly for experimental evaluations.…”

“…FRIDAL [17,18] is a system for solving the problem of desktop search engines finding files containing no textual information. FRIDAL calculates the relationship between files using information such as overlap counts, overlap durations, and differences in open times in the file-access logs.…”

“…We analyzed the timing overlaps between file accesses from the file-access logs, and combined this with a full-text search engine [17]. We then proposed a method for preparing a virtual folder containing related file data [14].…”

“…We have previously proposed methods to search for files containing no keywords [17,13,14,15,19] by analyzing fileaccess logs, based on the concept that related files are frequently accessed at the same time. We have also evaluated the effectiveness of these methods.…”