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. The personalized term weighting for a given term or phrase can be used to store and access documents containing the corresponding term or phrase in the spatial file system and provides coordinates in a spatial file system, for one or more documents containing the corresponding term or phrase. The location of a given document in a file space may be specified by the relative frequency distribution of the stems of its significant terms or phrases compared to the occurrence of such terms or phrases in a reference corpus. The employed term weighting scheme can be based on the fractional frequency of a term in a user's document relative to the fractional frequency of the term in the reference corpus, or alternative term weighting schemes, such as entropy weightings and traditional tfxidf weightings can be employed. A spatial rendering system utilizes the personalized term weights as coordinates for each document in a spatial file system. The spatial rendering system positions landmarks in the visual file space indicating terms that are correlated to terms associated with axes of the file system.