Skip to main content

TagTree: Storing and Re-finding Files Using Tags

  • Conference paper
Information Quality in e-Health (USAB 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7058))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Although desktop search engines are now widely available on the computers of typical users, navigation through folder hierarchies is still the dominant mode of information access. Most users still prefer to store and search for their information within a strict hierarchy of folders.

This paper describes TagTree, a new concept for storing and retrieving files and folders using tagging and automatically maintained navigational hierarchies. TagTree is compatible with all currently prevalent software environments. A prototype implementation called tagstore provides a flexible framework for experimentation and a testbed for both usability studies and longer term field tests.

Preliminary test results show a very positive user acceptance rate of using TagTrees for storing and re-finding files.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bergman, O., Beyth-Marom, R., Nachmias, R., Gradovitch, N., Whittaker, S.: Improved search engines and navigation preference in personal information management. Transactions on Information Systems 26(4), 1–24 (2008) ISSN 1046-8188, doi:10.1145/1402256.1402259

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Gonçalves, D.J., Jorge, J.A.: An Empirical Study of Personal Document Spaces. In: Jorge, J.A., Jardim Nunes, N., Falcão e Cunha, J. (eds.) DSV-IS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2844, pp. 46–60. Springer, Heidelberg (2003), http://virtual.inesc.pt/dsvis03/papers/05.pdf , doi:10.1007/b13960

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Barreau, D.: The persistence of behavior and form in the organization of personal information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(2), 307–317 (2008) ISSN 1532-2882, doi:10.1002/asi.20752

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Teevan, J., Alvarado, C., Ackerman, M.S., Karger, D.R.: The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2004, pp. 415–422. ACM, New York (2004), http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/work/publications/papers/chi04.pdf , doi:10.1145/985692.985745

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Alvarado, C., Teevan, J., Ackerman, M.S., Karger, D.: Surviving the information explosion: How people find their electronic information. AI Memo AIM-2003-006, MIT AI Laboratory, Department of Computer Science (2003), http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/6713

  6. Dourish, P., Edwards, W.K., LaMarca, A., Salisbury, M.: Presto: An experimental architecture for uid interactive document spaces. Transactions on Information Systems 6(2), 133–161 (1999), http://www.dourish.com/publications/1999/tochi-presto.pdf , ISSN 1073- 0516, doi:10.1145/319091.319099

    Google Scholar 

  7. Gifford, D.K., Jouvelot, P., Sheldon, M.A., James, W., O’Toole, J.: Semantic file systems. In: Proc. 13th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 1991), pp. 16–25. ACM (October 1991), http://cgs.csail.mit.edu/history/publications/Papers/sfs.ps , doi:10.1145/121132.121138

  8. Voit, K., Andrews, K., Slany, W.: Why personal information management (pim) technologies are not widespread. In: ASIS&T 2009 Workshop on Personal Information Management (PIM 2009) (November 2009), http://pimworkshop.org/2009/papers/voit-pim2009.pdf

  9. Boardman, R., Sasse, M.A., Spence, B.: Life beyond the mailbox: A crosstool perspective on personal information management. In: Proc. CSCW 2002 Workshop on Redesigning Email for the 21st Century. ACM (November 2002), http://www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/~rick/research/pubs/email-cscw2002.pdf

  10. Lansdale, M.W.: The psychology of personal information management. Applied Ergonomics 19(1), 55–66 (1988), http://simson.net/ref/1988/Lansdale88.pdf , ISSN 0003-6870, doi:10.1016/ 0003-6870(88)90199-8

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Dourish, P., Edwards, W.K., LaMarca, A., Salisbury, M.: Using properties for uniform interaction in the presto document system. In: Proc. 12th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 1999), pp. 55–64. ACM (November 1999), http://www2.parc.com/csl/projects/placeless/papers/uist99-presto.pdf , doi:10.1145/320719.322583

  12. Marsden, G., Cairns, D.E.: Improving the usability of the hierarchical file system. In: Proc. Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on Enablement through Technology (SAICSIT 2003), South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT), pp. 122–129 (September 2003), http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/archive/00000190/01/saicsit2003-dec.pdf , ISBN 1581137745

  13. Chau, D.H., Myers, B., Faulring, A.: What to do when search fails: Finding information by association. In: Proc. 26th SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), pp. 999–1008. ACM (April 2008), http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dchau/feldspar/feldspar-chi08.pdf doi:10.1145/1357054.1357208

  14. Freeman, E., Fertig, S.: Lifestreams: Organizing your electronic life. In: AAAI Fall Symposium 1995. AAAI (November 1995), http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Fall/1995/FS-95-03/FS95-03-007.pdf

  15. Gemmell, J., Bell, G., Lueder, R.: Mylifebits: A personal database for everything. Communications of the ACM 49(1), 88–95 (2006), http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/64157/tr-2006-23.pdf , ISSN 0001- 0782, doi:10.1145/1107458.1107460

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Hugh, H.: Personal brain (November 2010), http://www.thebrain.com/

  17. Huynh, D., Karger, D.R., Quan, D.: Haystack: A platform for creating, organizing and visualizing information using rdf. In: Proc. International Workshop on the Semantic Web (WWW 2002) (May 2002), http://semanticweb2002.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/proceedings/Research/huynh.pdf

  18. Bernardi, A.: Nepomuk: The social semantic desktop (November 2010), http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/

  19. Bloehdorn, S., Görlitz, O., Schenk, S., Völkel, M.: Tagfs — tag semantics for hierarchical file systems. In: Proc. 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management (I-KNOW 2006), pp. 304–312 (September 2006), http://triplei.tugraz.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/37tagfs.pdf

  20. Seltzer, M., Murphy, N.: Hierarchical file systems are dead. In: Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems HOTOS 2009, Monte Verita, Switzerland (May 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Fertig, S., Freeman, E., Gelernter, D.: Finding and reminding. reconsidered. SIGCHI Bulletin 28(1), 66–69 (1996) ISSN 0736-6906, doi:10.1145/249170.249187

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Shirky, C.: Ontology is overrated: Categories, links and tags (2005), http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontologyoverrated.html

  23. Freeman, E., Gelernter, D.: Lifestreams: A storage model for personal data. ACM SIGMOD Bulletin 25, 80–86 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Quan, D., Bakshi, K., Huynh, D., Karger, D.R.: User interfaces for supporting multiple categorization. In: Proc. 9th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2003), pp. 228–235. IOS Press (September 2003), http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/conferences/INTERACT2003/INTERACT2003-p228.pdf , ISBN 1586033638

  25. Mayer-Schönberger, V.: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton University Press (October 2009) ISBN 0691138613

    Google Scholar 

  26. Hsieh, J.L., Chen, C.H., Lin, I.W., Sun, C.T.: A web-based tagging tool for organizing personal documents on pcs. In: International Conference of Computer-Human Interaction 2008 (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy (April 2008), http://works.bepress.com/lucemia/18/

  27. Pak, R., Pautz, S., Iden, R.: Information organization and retrieval: A comparison of taxonomical and tagging systems. Cognitive Technology 12(1), 31–44 (2007), http://business.clemson.edu/Catlab/pubs/pak-pautziden-2007.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  28. Strohmaier, M., Koerner, C., Kern, R.: Why do users tag? detecting users’ motivation for tagging in social tagging systems. In: Proc. 4th International AAAI Conference onWeblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2010). Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (May 2010), http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/viewFile/1497/1892

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Voit, K., Andrews, K., Slany, W. (2011). TagTree: Storing and Re-finding Files Using Tags. In: Holzinger, A., Simonic, KM. (eds) Information Quality in e-Health. USAB 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7058. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25364-5_33

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25364-5_33

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25363-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25364-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics