A PDF document re-finding system with a Q&A wizard interface

Re-finding electronic documents from personal computers is a frequent demand. For a simple re-finding task, people can use many methods to retrieve the target document, such as navigating directly to its folder, searching with desktop search engines, or checking the Recent Files List. When encountering difficult re-finding tasks, people usually cannot rely on attributes exploited by conventional re-finding methods, the re-finding would fail. We propose a new method to support difficult re-finding tasks, by collecting extra new attributes of a document, such as number of pages, number of images, reading frequency, and coverage percentage. If the document is quested later, the collected attributes and experiences are used to filter out it. A question and answer wizard interface is utilized to alleviate cognitive burden when recollecting. Finally, we develop a PDF document re-finding system to evaluate the effectiveness of the method.