Describing Documents: What Can Users Tell Us?

With the increasing number of computers per user, it has become common for most users to deal with growing numbers of electronic documents. Those documents are usually stored in hierarchic file systems, requiring them to be classified into the hierarchy, a difficult task. Such organization schemes do not provide adequate support for the efficient and effortless retrieval of documents at a later time, since their position in the hierarchy is one of the only clues to a document's whereabouts. However, humans are natural-born storytellers, and stories help relate and remember important pieces of information. Hence, the usage of narratives where a user "tells a story" about the document will be a valuable tool towards simplifying the retrieval task