Constructing relationships in a hierarchical file system

We propose a scheme for more efficient navigation in a hierarchical file system. In the proposed scheme, a program running in the background computes the degree of relationship between a current file and others, and builds a list of the most related files. The current relationship metric being used by the program is a linear combination of five parameters: the name, the directory path, the type, the created time, and the last accessed time of a file. A simulated annealing algorithm is used in order to determine the weighting factors of the parameters. A set of experiments were conducted in order to access the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.