Feldspar: A System for Finding Information by Association

We present Feldspar, the first system that allows people to find personal information on the computer by specifying chains of other information that it is associated with, emulating the information retrieval process of human associative memory. Feldspar’s contributions include (1) a user interface for constructing retrieval queries that consist of multiple levels of associations, such as “find the folder containing the email attachment from the person I met at an event”; and (2) algorithms for collecting the association information and for providing answers to associative queries in real-time. A user study showed that Feldspar is easy to use, and is superior to conventional browsing and searching for these kinds of retrieval tasks. We have reported Feldspar’s implementation and evaluation in our long paper at CHI 2008. Here, our discussion focuses on the design and implementation ideas that we have tried, or are currently investigating. We hope this will stimulate further discussions and help inspire more design ideas.