Where Did I(T) Put It? - A Holistic Solution to the Automatic Construction of Topic Trees for Navigation

Managing information based on hierarchical structures is prevailing, be it by storing documents physically in a file structure like MS explorer or virtually in topic trees as in many web applications. The problem is that the structure evolves over time, created individually and hence reflecting individual opinions of how information objects should be grouped. This leads to time consuming searches and error prone retrieval results since relevant documents might be stored elsewhere. Our approach aims at solving the problem by replacing or complementing the manually created navigation structures by automatically created ones. We consider existing approaches for clustering and labelling and focus on yet unrewarding aspects like having information objects in inner nodes (as it is common in folder hierarchies) and cognitively adequate labelling for textual and non-textual resources. Evaluation was done by knowledge experts based on a comparison of retrieval time for finding given documents in manually and automatic generated information structures and showed the advantage of automatically created topic trees.