Ontology-Based File Naming Through Hierarchical Conceptual Clustering

Current directory-based hierarchical file systems have many limitations as the amount of unstructured data possessed by individual user is increasing continuously. One of the most significant problems is that users usually have difficulties searching, navigating, and organizing their files since useful semantic information describing a file is not used in the current directory-based system. To solve this problem, several research groups have suggested attribute-based file naming systems. However, their approaches have not been widely used because of lack of semantic information. In this paper, we describe the ontology-based semantic file naming approach that employs the hierarchical conceptual clustering technique to capture more complex semantic information from the set of file attributes. Ontologies, which play a major role on the Semantic Web, describe the semantics of data by organizing data into taxonomies of concepts and describing the relationships between concepts. To generate the ontology from the set of attribute-value pairs for files, we first extend one of the standard incremental hierarchical clustering techniques, COBWEB, and suggest the new clustering evaluation measure to guide search through the space of clustering. From the clustering result, we then generate the ontology and represent it by the RDF Schema. Our experimental results show that our extended clustering approach can produce a good quality of the concept hierarchy, and is computationally efficient and well suited to building the ontology-based semantic file system.