Method and apparatus for maintaining and navigating a non-hierarchical personal spatial file system

摘要

A self-organizing personal file system is disclosed that evaluates the “importance” of terms and phrases in a document in a personal corpus relative to usage in a reference corpus. A personalized term weighting scheme assigns a weight to terms or phrases based on the frequency of occurrence of the corresponding term or phrase in a reference corpus. Documents are positioned in a visual file space associated with a personal corpus by storing each of the documents with an indication of the term weight for terms appearing in the corresponding document. A singular value decomposition is performed based on the term weights to position a given document in the visual file space based on a relative frequency distribution of terms of the document compared to the occurrence of such terms in a reference corpus.

主权项

1. A method for positioning one or more documents in a visual file space associated with a personal corpus, said method comprising the steps of:
storing each of said documents with an indication of term weight for terms appearing in said corresponding document, wherein said term weight is obtained by dividing a fractional frequency of said term in said document by a fractional frequency of said term in said reference corpus, wherein said fractional frequency of said term in said document is the number of occurrences of the term in the document divided by the total number of terms in the document and wherein said fractional frequency of said term in said reference corpus is the number of occurrences of the term in the reference corpus divided by the total number of words in the reference corpus; and performing a singular value decomposition based on said term weights to position a given document in said visual file space based on a relative frequency distribution of terms of said document compared to the occurrence of such terms in a reference corpus.