ACOSys: An Experimental System for Automated Content Organization

Menu-hierarchy is an important mechanism for human-computer interaction. In this paper we report the design, prototyping, and experiences of an experimental system called ACOSys for automated organization of contents by menu/folder hierarchies. ACOSys is built on a similar principle of our other work, FcAWN – formal concept analysis for web navigation-menu design [32], where lattice theory [1] provides the mathematical basis for menu-structures while the user-interface remains unchanged. Implemented in Java and Perl, our experimental prototype has the following features: (a) automated generation of folder hierarchy; (b) automatic folder-name assignment; (c) pruning for global folder-depth control; (d) lattice-unfolding to obtain trees that allow for backing-up. An experiment study is performed for ACOSys to generate an organization of the Medlars collection, an archive of 1039 medical articles commonly used for information retrieval benchmarking. ACOSys created a hyper-link navigation hierarchy in a couple of minutes based on a ten attribute set; a desktop web-browser is used to test and validate the hierarchy. The basic idea of ACOSys comes from our recognition that menu-structures can be regarded as mathematical structures in the abstract sense and, in return, they can benefit from an order-theoretic investigation. An additional recognition is that tree-structures are important to facilitate the backing-up operation for folder hierarchies, but the tension between trees and lattices can be resolved by unfolding lattices to trees.