Personal Information Management - PIM

Personal information management (PIM) is a research field that examines the activities by which users save, organize and retrieve personal information items. PIM is a one of the essential new literacies for learners in the 21st century. This paper reports results from a pilot study that explored PIM practices and strategies of k-12 students, on their mobile devices. The results reveal three practices of organizing mobile applications: Never Organize (applications are left in the default location), Organize Occasionally (applications are organized periodically) and Organize Immediately (applications are organized as soon as they are downloaded). Three main strategies for organizing the applications were found: Organization by frequency of use and relevance, Organization by themes and Organization by visual cues. Finally, it was found that when trying to allocate applications on their mobile device, most students prefer to swipe the screens, rather than use the search option, even if ...

This paper describes an interview that investigated how people organize and find electronic documents on their computers. Fifteen Macintosh users were interviewed regarding their problems and approaches to filing and finding information. We found no evidence that users are having serious trouble finding files on their personal computers. We uncovered patterns of behavior that seem best described in terms of three types of information: ephemeral, working, and archived.

Modern work is a highly social process, offering many cues for people to organize communication and access information. Shared physical workplaces provide natural support for tasks such as (a) social reminding about communication commitments and keeping track of collaborators and friends, and (b) social data mining of local expertise for advice and information. However, many people now collaborate remotely using tools such as email and voicemail. Our field studies show that these tools do not provide the social cues needed for group work processes. In part, this is because the tools are organized around messages, rather than people. In response to this problem, we created ContactMap, a system that makes people the primary unit of interaction. ContactMap provides a structured social desktop representation of users' important contacts that directly supports social reminding and social data mining. We conducted an empirical evaluation of ContactMap, comparing it with traditional em...

With the dissemination of computers and the advent of ubiquitous computing, elder citizens and other people with cognitive problems face increasingly large barriers to the interaction with their electronic documents. The average user now handles increasingly large numbers of documents of ever increasing variety both in type and in content. Moreover, those documents can now be accessed, at times and places where such interactions were thus far impossible. Current approaches require documents to be ...

The spread of mobile communications and IT artifacts in general, gives rise to a pervasive number of mobile working modalities, inducing transformations in social practices and organizational environments in a networked society. In order to design information systems we need to understand how information artifacts are used to get work done, and how these support work, inside and outside the organizations. By drawing on personal information management studies, information needs, and information-related myths, we built a qualitative study to uncover artifacts used to cross different information spaces, by different individuals, in different working contexts, over three years. The present case follows an approach built by researcher and research agent, across different information spaces, where we confronted the existing body of knowledge with empirical data collected. The first results show that permanent reconfigurations of working spaces beyond organizational boundaries are supported by deliberate mixes of information artifacts, that seem to be determined by familiarity with place, anticipation of needs, type of transportation used, distance and time covered, and access issues.

Despite much discussion in HCI research about how individual differences likely determine computer users' personal information management (PIM) practices, the extent of the influence of several important factors remains unclear, including users' personalities, spatial abilities, and the different software used to manage their collections. We therefore analyse data from prior CHI work to explore (1) associations of people's file collections with personality and spatial ability, and (2) differences between collections managed with different operating systems and file managers. We find no notable associations between users' attributes and their collections, and minimal predictive power, but do find considerable and surprising differences across operating systems. We discuss these findings and how they can inform future research.

In this paper we describe the design and trial use of Cardinal, novel software that overcomes the limitations of existing research tools used in personal information management (PIM) studies focusing on file management (FM) behavior. Cardinal facilitates large-scale collection of FM behavior data along an extensive list of file system properties and additional relevant dimensions (e.g., demographic, software and hardware, etc). It enables anonymous, remote, and asynchronous participation across the 3 major operating systems, uses a simple interface, and provides value to participants by presenting a summary of their file and folder collections. In a 15-day trial implementation, Cardinal examined over 2.3 million files across 46 unsupervised participants. To test its adaptability we extended it to also collect psychological questionnaire responses and technological data from each participant. Participation sessions took an average of just over 10 minutes to complete, and participants reported positive impressions of their interactions. Following the pilot, we revised Cardinal to further decrease participation time and improve the user interface. Our tests suggest that Cardinal is a viable tool for FM research, and so we have made its source freely available to the PIM community.

Despite much discussion in HCI research about how individual differences likely determine computer users' personal information management (PIM) practices, the extent of the influence of several important factors remains unclear, including users' personalities, spatial abilities, and the different software used to manage their collections. We therefore analyse data from prior CHI work to explore (1) associations of people's file collections with personality and spatial ability, and (2) differences between collections managed with different operating systems and file managers. We find no notable associations between users' attributes and their collections, and minimal predictive power, but do find considerable and surprising differences across operating systems. We discuss these findings and how they can inform future research.

In this paper we describe the design and trial use of Cardinal, novel software that overcomes the limitations of existing research tools used in personal information management (PIM) studies focusing on file management (FM) behavior. Cardinal facilitates large-scale collection of FM behavior data along an extensive list of file system properties and additional relevant dimensions (e.g., demographic, software and hardware, etc). It enables anonymous, remote, and asynchronous participation across the 3 major operating systems, uses a simple interface, and provides value to participants by presenting a summary of their file and folder collections. In a 15-day trial implementation, Cardinal examined over 2.3 million files across 46 unsupervised participants. To test its adaptability we extended it to also collect psychological questionnaire responses and technological data from each participant. Participation sessions took an average of just over 10 minutes to complete, and participants reported positive impressions of their interactions. Following the pilot, we revised Cardinal to further decrease participation time and improve the user interface. Our tests suggest that Cardinal is a viable tool for FM research, and so we have made its source freely available to the PIM community.

Could free software artificial intelligence be uniquely positioned to help alleviate poverty, hunger, disease, and a slew of other aptly-termed "wicked problems?" There are a number of positive indicators. Free software such as Linux has the benevolent property that it may be copied ad infinitum for essentially zero cost, enabling worldwide distribution. Moreover, modern artificial intelligence software on commodity hardware is capable of solving an increasingly wide range of problems, often with superhuman performance. Additionally, the digital divide is disappearing, with intermediaries able to reach the rest. These factors mean that essentially everyone may soon have access to or benefit from free superhuman intelligence. If so, a virtual secondary social safety net system could be developed (at near-zero development and marginal cost), which could help people to be more self-reliant and less dependent on a primary social safety net. This could help to improve quality of life, reduce suffering, and save lives. We propose the Free Life Planner (FLP), a systematic life-planning system intended to help fulfill this opportunity.

Smarting-up email processing is a challenging task. Users file or retrieve multiple messages every day, while receiving little support from most popular email clients. Incorporating semi-automatic sorting into existing applications can help users with their daily work through more efficient organization and more effective search. Successful and seamless integration of tagging into existing email solutions requires exact analysis of user practices, needs and considerations, which are addressed and discussed in this contribution.

We report on a study of the practices people employ to organize resources for their activities on their computers. Today the computer is the main working environment for many people. People use computers to do an increasing number of tasks. We observed different patterns of organization of resources across the desktop and the folder structure. We describe several strategies that people employ to customize the environment in order to easily perform their activities, access their resources, and overview their current tasks.

People today use the computer for many simultaneous work projects and activities. The traditional file system was developed for storing and retrieving files and it and the desktop have not evolved with users' practices. The first part of the dissertation presents a user study that generates a better understanding of the issues and practices regarding the organization of documents in support of activities. The second part provides the design of an environment to organize information based on an activity paradigm as opposed to an archiving paradigm and delivers the instantiation and the evaluation of a system based on such a design. The system, called Docksy, provides an environment structured in workspaces. Each workspace is segmented in areas or panels. Users can use documents as elements to structure their workflow or to manage their activities by separating files in the different panels, and by adding comments, tags, and flags. The Docksy design aims to create a flexible, lightweight environment that is easy to use and can be incorporated into users' daily practice, old or new. Such a system could be used to learn about users' practices and their evolution. Docksy was therefore developed for a double purpose; the short term purpose of testing new features (panels, comments, flags,

Today we live in an information society, which is to a large extent also a document society (Buckland, 2018). In our daily lives, we must cope with an ever-growing flood of different documents, keep track of them, pick out relevant content, and produce documents in suitable forms. In addition, tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as ChatGPT[1], are making their way into the document world, challenging us with new affordances, and questions about how to deal with them and what changes this will bring.

Existing documentation models such as the model of complementarity (N. W. Lund, 2004), the ontology of human expression (Olsen et al., 2012), and the document phenomenology (Gorichanaz & Latham, 2016) contain valuable indications from which we can learn a lot about the process of document production. However, current models are missing out on the relations between the variables of the greater system in which they are embedded such as documents as instruments, the community, rules, and the division of labor, as well as the subject's actions, motives, and greater goals in the documentation activity.

This conceptual paper presents the model of documentation activity, which on the one hand can unite and expand existing models in the field of document theory, and on the other hand provide a common crystallization point for practitioners and scholars from related fields to analyze the documentation activity within a dynamic socio-technical system. The model of documentation activity is developed along existing document theory concepts using activity theory (AT) (Engeström, 1987) as a framework.

[1] ChatGPT is a system for natural language processing (NLP) based on deep learning technology which was developed by the company OpenAI. ChatGPT can generate human-like conversations by understanding the context of a conversation and generating appropriate responses. (Deng & Lin, 2023).

This paper presents a usability-tested interface design that enables time-constrained analysts to organize their search results in a lightweight manner during and immediately following their search sessions. The research literature suggests that users want to lay out search results spatially in overlapping "piles," but a pilot study with a flexible canvas tool revealed that this design requires too much manipulation and has other drawbacks. This finding led to a novel hybrid design that combines structure with a flexible visual layout and which allows the analysts to quickly triage documents first and organize them later, or interweave these two processes. Two usability studies comparing the new design against a legacy tool found overwhelming preference for the new tool for saving and organizing search results. Design guidelines derived from this work could improve sensemaking interfaces for other search applications.

Here we describe two approaches to improve group information management (GIM) and draw on the results of prior works to implement them in software prototypes. The first aids browsing and retrieving from large and unfamiliar collections like shared drives by dynamically reducing and re-organising them. The second supports the transfer and re-use of collections (e.g. to/by successors, descendants, or curators) by integrating novel sorting and annotation features. The prototypes' source code is shared online and screenshots are presented in the accompanying poster.

Here we describe two approaches to improve group information management (GIM) and draw on the results of prior works to implement them in software prototypes. The first aids browsing and retrieving from large and unfamiliar collections like shared drives by dynamically reducing and re-organising them. The second supports the transfer and re-use of collections (e.g. to/by successors, descendants, or curators) by integrating novel sorting and annotation features. The prototypes' source code is shared online and screenshots are presented in the accompanying poster.

In this study, we proposed and examined a theoretical framework for affective interactions with personal information management (PIM). Based on the literature, we identified seven salient affective aspects of PIM: anxiety, efficacy, frustration, desperation, belonging, dependence and loss of control. We examined their frequencies and identified individual differences for age, gender and the number of platforms people use to manage their personal information. Data were collected from 465 participants who filled in a questionnaire built and validated by the researchers. Findings revealed a complex and intense affective experience accompanying PIM that is characterized by anxiety and frustration on the one hand but by a sense of high efficacy and little desperation on the other. The affective experience was more intense for female participants, was correlated with the number of PIM platforms used and decreased with age. We offer various explanations of these findings and suggest implications for future research and platform design.

Personal information management (PIM) on digital platforms requires multiple practices of saving, organizing and retrieving information. This exploratory study offers a new perspective on PIM practices and focuses on the gaps between their actual and ideal use. Data were collected from 465 participants, 114 males and 351 females, who filled in a questionnaire that we developed and validated for 25 PIM practices. Findings showed significant gaps between actual and ideal usage for 22 out of 25 practices. These gaps were mostly positive, revealing that participants wished to use more practices than they actually did and were not satisfied with their PIM behavior. They were larger for women, and we also found age differences. Larger gaps could be associated with negative feelings and a sense of low efficacy in managing personal information. We offer various explanations of the gaps and suggest implications for consumer training and platform design.

There are two main ways to retrieve files: hierarchical folder navigation and query-based search using a search engine. Research consistently shows that users prefer retrieving files using folder navigation, rather than more flexible querybased search. But desktop search engines continue to improve, so does this mean that younger generations rely more on search as their usage habits were formed when experiencing more effective search? This study tested age effects on search use by asking 289 participants to retrieve 1,557 of their shared files. Counterintuitively, our results showed a positive correlation between age and search percentage, with participants over fifty searching over four times as much as participants in their twenties. Results were confirmed by an n = 653 combined data analysis. A possible explanation is that older participants forget the location of their files. We discuss the deep neuro-cognitive roots of navigation preference which may also explain our findings.

This paper is a case study of an artifact design and evaluation process; it is a reflection on how right thinking about design methods may at times result in sub-optimal results. Our goal has been to assess our decision making processthroughout the design and evaluation stages for a software prototype in order to consider where design methodology may need to be tuned to be more sensitive to the domain of practice, in this case software evaluation in personal information management. In particular, we reflect on design methods around (1) ...

Personal information management (PIM) practices of 83 knowledge workers from 11 companies in Kuwait were surveyed focusing on finding; organization & management; and re-finding of information. Results indicated that information was gathered from a variety of sources for performing tasks at hand. About more than 50% of it was also kept for future use. Employees saved this information on desktops and hard drives and also used Favorites and Bookmarks to facilitate its refinding. They used different work related categories to organize information in folders. They regularly updated their files and folders and also used tools to support PIM activities. Awareness needs to be created about knowledge organization schemes such as personal taxonomies and categorization to better organize e-documents in personal collections. Enhanced information literacy training with appropriate integration of PIM skills will improve information finding and re-finding to help exploit digital information more effectively.

Research has found that if respondents do not manage their personal records such as bills, receipts and tax-related documents efficiently, they risk not being able to re-find them when needed, resulting in significant problems. A significant gap in understanding and addressing this problem stems from a lack of knowledge of the format of these records, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, that may have caused an increase in managing personal records in an electronic format, rather than by hardcopy. This paper provides results of quantitative research conducted in 2018, thereby providing a valuable benchmark for future research on the same and related topics. This measurement was achieved by means of an online survey distributed via social media amongst 205 respondents. The results revealed that nearly all respondents (97%) retained at least some records, and more than 80% kept some of those records in an electronic format, particularly travel reservations and payslips. Conversely, only 10% of respondents kept receipts and warranties for appliances or medical records in an electronic format. The reason for these differences in propensity of keeping various records in an electronic or hardcopy format will require further research.

The purpose of this article is to identify the key attributes of personal electronic records in order to develop systems that may enable people to manage them in the home. As more personal information becomes electronic, this is increasingly necessary. Personal electronic records were identified and categorised using interviews and virtual guided tours. Three main attributes were identified: primary user-subjective categories; attributes which identify the circumstances that give rise to the records; and attributes which describe the legal validity of each record. In addition to providing an improved understanding of personal electronic records in the home, these attributes are developed into a set of potential metadata fields.

Personal task management (PTM) is a common human activity that is supported by a plethora of dedicated e-PTM tools. Yet, little is known about how and why PTM behaviors change over time, and how PTM tools can accommodate such changes. We studied changes in 178 participants' PTM behaviors in a survey to inform the design of personalizable e-PTM tools that can accommodate changes over time. In follow-up interviews with 12 of the survey respondents, we deepened our understanding of the changes reported in the survey. Based on the reasons behind the reported changes, we identified factors that contributed to changes in PTM behaviors: changing needs, dissatisfaction caused by unmet needs, and opportunities revealing unnoticed needs. Grounded in our findings, we offer implications for design of PTM tools that support changes in behaviors as well as implications for future PTM research.

Users have to rely on memory for storing or retrieving data in Hierarchical Folder Organization (HFO) such as the Microsoft Windows Explorer for managing their information. We propose 20 Interface Design Objectives (IDOs) for Personal Information Management (PIM) interfaces. We find IDOs of HFO that need the most improvement using a qualitative survey of 66 users on importance and satisfaction scales. We present an alternate tagbased interface called TAGZILLA based on the concept of the 'Stream of Consciousness'. TAGZILLA provides users with an interface to create tags for storing files and retrieve files based on tags. It also suggests tags during storage and retrieval. We report an increase in satisfaction for all IDOs using a return survey with 20 participants who used TAGZILLA. We also present a preliminary quantitative experimental comparison of TAGZILLA with the Windows Explorer interface for the IDOs needing most improvement.

In today’s digital era, email communication has become a fundamental aspect of personal and professional interactions. However, the increasing volume of emails causes significant challenges in efficiently organising and managing a user’s mailbox. Existing email clients provide automation such as rule-based filtering and spam detection. However, Park et al.’s investigation highlights that users expressed the need for better automation within email clients. This thesis investigates the reasons why users refrain from using rule-based filtering and folders when managing and organising their emails.

In our literature study on the state of the art of email overload and the challenges related to it, we observed the lack of a recent study identifying the gaps between the automation provided by email clients and the effective usability of this functionality by users. Much research has been conducted to optimise spam filters and provide users a platform to filter emails by defining their own rules using richer data models. However, there is less recent research on identifying the reasons behind a user’s cluttered inbox and their reluctance to use the available feature of folders for organising their emails. Therefore, we first conducted an exploratory survey to gain insights on arbitrary users’ email management practices. We examined how often they check their emails, how many emails they receive per day, how they manage emails in their inbox, whether they create and maintain folders, whether they are aware of the available rule-based filtering, whether they prefer using rule-based filtering and if not then why and whether users would be interested in a machine learning-based component in their email client which could recommend them to move certain emails to folders based on their previous actions. Thereby, we observed that participants have a large number of emails in their inbox and do not manually create and manage folders to organise their mailbox.

Based on our findings, we designed Inbox Harmony, a recommendation system to manage and organise emails. Given that ‘harmony’ means an orderly and pleasing arrangement of parts, our recommendation system, consisting of two parts, intends to bring harmony to a user’s inbox. The first part is the selection, optimisation and deployment of the machine learning model to perform some natural language processing and text classification. We decided to choose Classifier Chains, a multi-label classification algorithm and Fuzzy C-Means, a soft-clustering algorithm based on the principles of fuzzy logic. Further, we utilised a hybrid deployment approach by training both of these models on an individual’s Gmail account and providing personalised yet accurate machine learning-based recommendations to move a user’s emails from their inbox to other folders. Our solution not only shows suggestions for moving emails to already existing folders, but it also finds similar emails present in an inbox, groups them and recommends creating a new folder for those emails. In contrast to existing rule-based filtering where an email can only be assigned to a single folder, Inbox Harmony can suggest multiple folders for a given email.

Inbox Harmony can currently be used as an add-on for the popular Gmail email client. As highlighted in Figure 1, we display the add-on in an individual user’s Gmail interface based on the Google Apps Script. The Inbox Harmony user interface presents users various machine learning-based recommendations to move different emails from their inbox to suggested folders (labels). A user can then easily move, delete or reject the recommendation with a single click. New folders can also be created while moving the email from the inbox to the newly suggested folder (i.e. add a label). Finally, the machine learning model learns from the actions taken by the user in order to provide better recommendations over time. A main contribution is the insight gained from our survey on email use and management, resulting in the successful development of Inbox Harmony’s machine learning-based recommendations.

Over the last two decades a significant number of computer-based tools (sometimes referred to as Personal Information Managers or PIMs)[1] have been created in order to assist in the storage and management of such information. Examples include email, contact and event management software (eg Microsoft Outlook); hierarchical outliners; mind-mapping software (eg MindManager) and the use of general applications such as spreadsheets and relational databases (eg Microsoft Access). So far it is arguable that no tool has achieved ubiquity, ...

This paper firstly introduces personal information management using computers. It then describes a suggested approach to auditing the information needs which are personal to a knowledge worker. As part of an overall research programme in personal information management, the paper describes a personal auditing approach which is positioned as part of the experimental research aspect of the overall research. The paper aims to give practical guidance including on the effective classification of an individual's data.

Researchers have been studying personal information management (PIM) for many years, but little exists by way of practical advice for how individuals should manage their own information. We employed the Delphi Method to engage PIM researchers with expertise in a variety of relevant areas in a five-round extended dialog about PIM practices. Participants identified key everyday choices of PIM, suggested alternatives, and identified pros and cons of each alternative. Our contributions include: 1) a set of 36 PIM practices, along with pros, cons, and recommendations for or against each practice, 2) directions of future research and development including "near-future" improvements in tool support and 3) a detailed description of how we applied the Delphi Method to study PIM and how it might be used more widely in HCI research as a complement to more established methods of inquiry.

Information Literacy (IL) and Personal Information Management (PIM) are two closely related and overlapping concepts. However, most of the existing IL models and standards do not put adequate emphasis on relevant PIM skills. This paper provides an overview of different PIM techniques and discusses their relationship with IL competencies. Proper integration of PIM techniques and tools into IL skills is likely to further strengthen competency level of an information literate person, resulting in saving time, effort and resources. This integration can also help overcome the problems of information overload and information fragmentation. This paper argues that information literacy training programs need to expand their scope by incorporating appropriate PIM skills to provide a more comprehensive skill set to their information users.

The work reported in this thesis was supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under the DERI-Líon project (SFI/02/CE1/I131) and the DERI-Líon-II project (SFI/08/CE/I1380) and by the European Union 6th Framework under the NEPOMUK IP (FP6-027705) project.

Organizing personal information by folders or tags has proved to be effective for finding, remembering, and understanding information. However, past studies have shown that the cost of organization can be too high for some users to be worth the effort. Mixed-initiative approaches attempt to reduce the burden of manual organization by automatically identifying and suggesting organizational units such as folders to users. However, little is known about how such mixed-initiative approaches influence users' organizational experiences. In this paper, we explore a mixed-initiative approach that suggests high-level organizational units to users to facilitate email organization. In two in-situ experiments with 34 knowledge workers, we study how our mixed-initiative approach influenced users' experience with organization. We show that our approach made it easier to create organizational units without negatively affecting recall of those units, and led to the creation of units that otherwise would have not been created. Our findings suggest ways computers and people can most effectively work together to organize information.

Users of computer systems create and store valuable personal information in files, email folders, and bookmark collections. For decades, the main principle of interacting with files, emails, and bookmarks has remained unchanged: hierarchical directory trees with standard (Windows Explorer style) browsers. Users often have problems both in classifying new items and maintaining a classification hierarchy as such. With files, emails, and bookmarks, users often end up maintaining three parallel classification hierarchies, one in each tool. Over the past thirty years, a number of alternative personal information management (PIM) tools have emerged, but the typical user is still faced with hierarchical directory structures. This position paper addresses some of the reasons why modern PIM tools are not widespread and proposes a set of eight requirements for future PIM tools.

We conducted a study on how academic researchers manage multiple documents acquired from the web for later retrieval. We interviewed 11 participants and identified their strategies when trying to re-find specific documents. We found that they often prefer web-based search for re-finding documents, despite knowing that the document of interest is stored on their computers. We argue that Web search engines can act as an extension of the desktop information space. We found that users choose keyword-based search not only when the document's location is unknown but also when the retrieval cost is very low: they do not bother about properly storing files because most files are easily found again with a webbased search engine. We close by discussing the implication of these findings for the design of future document management tools.

The popularity and improvement in features provided by various Internet services are leading us to a situation where personal information items can be stored and managed online. Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to a set of activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and distribute personal information for different purposes, including preserving personal and family information assets. The main purpose of this study was to investigate perceptions of university students of Internet services for managing their personal information; the type of information stored by them; how they organize, manage, access and control information distribution; and their concerns regarding privacy and security of their personal information. A pre-tested questionnaire was used for data collection and 212 students from two public universities took part in this study. It was found that 75% of the respondents were using Internet services for storing and managing some of their personal information items. The Internet services were mainly used by the students for storing email addresses and messages, personal text documents and photos. Only a small number of the students were using online storage for maintaining information about their appointments, telephone numbers, draft documents, audio and video recordings, and list of thing to be done. Over two-thirds of the respondents revealed that they only store nonsensitive personal information due to their concerns related to privacy and security of personal information. The paper also suggests certain measures for the improvement of personal information management skills of students and the general public.

Information Seeking and Sensemaking for 'Personal Fit' Ann Abraham, Marian Petre, Helen Sharp Centre for Research in Computing, Department of Computing Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, England MK7 6AA Contact author: am abraham@ open. ac. uk ABSTRACT This ...

The maturation of high-speed internet and web technologies, combined with the massive volume of information available through the World Wide Web, has enabled and motivated many people to access the internet whom might never have chosen to do so previously. Perhaps the most difficult challenge that computer programmers and web designers face today is the development of easy to use systems for neophyte computer users that simultaneously allow for robust, queriable access to their own, and to other, complex information sets and technical content in an efficient manner. In this paper we report on the ongoing development of the Chocolate Research Portal, a portal designed for use by both expert historical researchers, as well as the general public. The portal design uses concept maps in a content management framework as the primary means whereby content is collected, organized, curated, searched, and disseminated.

The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the preferred repository of information. The strength of this information infrastructure is also its weakness. Faced with the chaos of millions of places to go and thousands of places to remember having been, the thousands of new Web users who join every day, need a helping hand. The aim of this paper is, to highlight possible components of technologies supporting web navigation and the maintenance of indexes to web resources. The BASE framework is suggested as a means of understanding the pragmatic technological choices, and six experimental prototypes are presented and discussed. The prototypes support various aspects of bookmark maintenance and information filtering.

Personal task management (PTM) is a common human activity that is supported by a plethora of dedicated e-PTM tools. Yet, little is known about how and why PTM behaviors change over time, and how PTM tools can accommodate such changes. We studied changes in 178 participants' PTM behaviors in a survey to inform the design of personalizable e-PTM tools that can accommodate changes over time. In follow-up interviews with 12 of the survey respondents, we deepened our understanding of the changes reported in the survey. Based on the reasons behind the reported changes, we identified factors that contributed to changes in PTM behaviors: changing needs, dissatisfaction caused by unmet needs, and opportunities revealing unnoticed needs. Grounded in our findings, we offer implications for design of PTM tools that support changes in behaviors as well as implications for future PTM research.

A plethora of electronic personal task management (e-PTM) tools have been designed to help individuals manage their tasks. There is a lack of evidence, however, on the extent to which these tools actually help. In addition, previous research has reported that e-PTM tools have low adoption rates. To understand the reasons for such poor adoption and to gain insight into individual differences in PTM, we conducted a focus group with 7 participants followed by a field study with 12 participants, both in an academic setting. This paper describes different behaviors involved in managing everyday tasks. Based on the similarities and differences in individuals' PTM behaviors, we identify three types of users: adopters, make-doers, and do-it-yourselfers. Grounded in our findings, we offer design guidelines for personalized PTM tools, which can serve the different types of users and their behaviors.

Resumen Las bases de datos NoSQL surgieron como una alternativa de solución a problemas no resueltos eficientemente por las tradicionales bases de datos relacionales. Sin embargo, el término NoSQL abarca diferentes tipos de bases de datos, cada uno con sus características intrínsecas que le confieren un comportamiento más o menos apropiados para diferentes escenarios de aplicación. Las bases de datos de grafos se encuentran dentro de esa gran y variada familia de bases de datos. Esta línea de investigación surge como una iniciativa de las dos docentes que constituyen el equipo de cátedra de las asignaturas de bases de datos del Departamento de Informática, con la finalidad de profundizar en el estudio de esta nueva y prometedora generación de bases de datos.

Abstract: The `SemanticLIFE' system is designed to store, manage and retrieve ones lifetime's informationentities. It enables the acquisition and storage of data while giving annotations to email messages,browsed web pages, phone calls, images, contacts, life events and other resources. `SemanticLIFE'also provides intuitive and effective search mechanism based upon stored semantics. This paperpresents the framework for the system to devise lifetime

Abstract: This paper contends that improved teaching and the emergence of research questions may be based on reflective self-observation, structured by means of personal knowledge management tools, often between and after cycles of action research. The paper revisits the concepts of data, information, knowledge, meaning and action. It proposes that knowledge be enacted in engaged teaching and research. It discusses how reflection on teaching and research can be structured as self-observation made visual in the form of ...

Here we describe two approaches to improve group information management (GIM) and draw on the results of prior works to implement them in software prototypes. The first aids browsing and retrieving from large and unfamiliar collections like shared drives by dynamically reducing and re-organising them. The second supports the transfer and re-use of collections (e.g. to/by successors, descendants, or curators) by integrating novel sorting and annotation features. The prototypes' source code is shared online and screenshots are presented in the accompanying poster.

Research has found that if respondents do not manage their personal records such as bills, receipts and tax-related documents efficiently, they risk not being able to re-find them when needed, resulting in significant problems. A significant gap in understanding and addressing this problem stems from a lack of knowledge of the format of these records, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, that may have caused an increase in managing personal records in an electronic format, rather than by hardcopy. This paper provides results of quantitative research conducted in 2018, thereby providing a valuable benchmark for future research on the same and related topics. This measurement was achieved by means of an online survey distributed via social media amongst 205 respondents. The results revealed that nearly all respondents (97%) retained at least some records, and more than 80% kept some of those records in an electronic format, particularly travel reservations and payslips. Conversely, only 10% of respondents kept receipts and warranties for appliances or medical records in an electronic format. The reason for these differences in propensity of keeping various records in an electronic or hardcopy format will require further research.

The purpose of this article is to identify the key attributes of personal electronic records in order to develop systems that may enable people to manage them in the home. As more personal information becomes electronic, this is increasingly necessary. Personal electronic records were identified and categorised using interviews and virtual guided tours. Three main attributes were identified: primary user-subjective categories; attributes which identify the circumstances that give rise to the records; and attributes which describe the legal validity of each record. In addition to providing an improved understanding of personal electronic records in the home, these attributes are developed into a set of potential metadata fields.