Conceptual File Management: Revising the structure of classification-based information retrieval

This paper addresses the Information Retrieval issues by today's hierarchical systems such as file systems. They usually contain substantial amount of redundant items. Maintaining the structure becomes difficult when large amount of items exist and ambiguity occurs in the structure. In this study, a conceptual method is presented that replaces the “containment” principle involved in current systems by “membership” principle. The proposed Conceptual File Management (CFM) method allows a file to be accessed from multiple folders; furthermore, it keeps the current hierarchical structure with minor changes. CFM reduces the ambiguity and redundancy, therefore the quality of information retrieval is improved. A Conceptual File Manager based on the above-mentioned principle has been developed. Experiments show that it improves the quality of the system in terms of maintaining the structure and retrieving the desired items easier and faster based on users' viewpoints. CFM is applicable to not only traditional file systems on computers, but also file systems on cell phones (and message storage systems), site maps in Web sites, Content Management Systems, taxonomies, and in general, classification based structures.