Document Topic Explorer

List Topic View
Tile Topic View

The Problem

When you have many documents in the same folder, and the file names are either too brief, or not descriptive enough as to tell you what’s inside, it's difficult to locate a particular document. Metadata such as Date, Size, etc., are often not very helpful in such cases. Especially, in the SharePoint or Enterprise environment, where many documents are created by other people, with file names that you don’t have any control over, finding a needed document can be time-consuming.

Solution

This app uses advanced natural language processing technologies for discovering topics of each document in the folder, and then present such topic information in a way that the user can easily find a needed document by just taking a glance at the folder.

After documents are processed, in the List View, the app adds a new column in the UI, and populates the fields with meaningful words/phrases that accurately represent the prominent topics in the content. Thus users can easily find a needed document by just taking a glance at the file manager's UI. Hovering over the fields will display more topics for each documents. In the Tile View, they provide much more information about the content of the document in a easy and fun way. Furthermore, it provides a novel UI in the form of a Topic Explorer, in comparison with the normal File Explorer. If a user does not remember where a needed document is located, but remembers what the document content is about, then the user can browse to the document by the topics, without needing to run a search, or open the documents one by one.

We will further perfect it and implement the technology in other types of file management systems, including Window Desktop, Emails, Enterprise File Servers, and other online file storage systems.