Knowledge File System -- A Principled Approach to Personal Information Management

The Knowledge File System (KFS) is a smart virtual file system that sits between the operating system and the file system. Its primary functionality is to automatically organize files in a transparent and seamless manner so as to facilitate easy retrieval. Think of the KFS as a personal assistant, who can file every one of you documents into multiple appropriate folders, so that when it comes time for you to retrieve a file, you can easily find it among any of the folders that are likely to contain it. Technically, KFS analyzes each file and hard links (which are simply pointers to a physical file on POSIX file systems) it to multiple destination directories (categories). The actual classification can be based on a combination of file content analysis, file usage analysis, and manually configured rules. Since the KFS organizes files using the familiar file/folder metaphor, it enjoys 3 key advantages against desktop search based solutions such as Google's Desktop Search, namely 1) usability, 2) portability, and 3) compatibility. The KFS has been prototyped using the FUSE (File system in User space) framework on Linux. Apache Lucerne was used to provide traditional desktop search capability in the KFS. A machine learning text classifier was used as the KFS content classifier, complimenting the customizable rule-based KFS classification framework. Lastly, an embedded database is used to log all file access to support file-usage classification.