Intelligent file management in ubiquitous environments

The paradigm of Ubiquitous computing seeks to build a computing environment that responds to user context. An ideal file system for the Ubiquitous environment is one that can successfully recognize the present context and automate file management. The intelligence in the Ubiquitous file management is achieved by applying a heuristics based clustering approach to the system. The applied heuristics are those that are used on file attributes by users to manually manage files in a traditional file system. File attributes can be used to relate files to the most appropriate work-context and also draw inter-file relationships. We discuss methods to harness the given file information from the file-system to form a context-relation wrapper over disparate files. This enables management of files as context related working sets rather than as individual files. A survey was conducted among regular computer users and the compiled results supported our context based file clustering approach. The experiments also showed promising results that confirm our model on the file heuristics, thus finding semantic relations between those files.