Towards a novel desktop search technique

Abstract

The most serious challenges Personal Information Management Systems face today are the results of having to deal with a large number of heterogeneous types of data from diverse data sources, but having no means of managing and searching them in a convenient, unified fashion. We argue that simplicity and flexibility are essential attributes for the next-generation search tools to respond to these challenges. This paper lays out specific issues to realizing such a tool in the context of desktop search and ties them to existing search techniques employed by Database Management Systems and Information Retrieval -the two leading disciplines in search technology. We propose a novel technique for desktop search and show how our combined database and information retrieval approach to searching heterogeneous desktop data is going to benefit a large community of users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.