Confluence: enhancing contextual desktop search

We present Confluence, an enhancement to a desktop file search tool called Connections which extracts conceptual re-lationships between files by their temporal access patterns in the file system. A limitation of a purely file-based approach is that as file operations are increasingly abstracted by ap-plications, their correlation to a user’s activity weakens and thereby reduces the applicability of their temporal patterns. To deal with this problem, we augment the file event stream with a stream of window focus events from the UI layer. We present 3 algorithms that analyze this new stream, extract-ing the user’s task information which informs the existing Connections algorithms. We present results and conclusions from a preliminary user study on Confluence