The most effective strategy for finding files is to carefully arrange them into folders. This strategy breaks down for teams, where organizational schemes often differ between team members. It also breaks down when information is copied and reused as it becomes harder to track versions. As storage continues to grow and costs decline, the incentives to carefully archive old versions of files diminish. It is therefore important to explore new and improved search tools. The most common approach is keyword search, though recalling effective keywords can be challenging, especially as repositories grow and information flows across projects. A less common alternative is to use provenance --information about the creation, use and sharing of documents and their context, including collaborators. This paper presents a limited user study showing that provenance data is useful and desirable in search, and that an interface based on a graphical sketchpad is not only feasible, but efficient.
['Soroush Ghorashi', 'Carlos Jensen']
Leyline: provenance-based search using a graphical sketchpad