Most information retrieval technologies are designed to facilitate information discovery. However, much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously seen information. We describe the design and evaluation of a system, called Stuff I’ve Seen (SIS), that facilitates information re-use. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the system provides a unified index of information that a person has seen, whether it was seen as email, web page, document, appointment, etc. Second, because the information has been seen before, rich contextual cues can be used in the search interface. The system has been used internally by more than 230 employees. We report on both qualitative and quantitative aspects of system use. Initial findings show that time and people are important retrieval cues. Users find information more easily using SIS, and use other search tools less frequently after installation.

P2P file sharing systems are rapidly becoming one of the most popular applications on the internet, with millions of users online exchanging files daily. While primarily intended for sharing multimedia files, programs such as Gnutella, Freenet, and Kazaa frequently allow other types of files to be shared. Although this has no doubt contributed to P2P filesharing's growing popularity, it raises serious security concerns about the types of files that users are aware of sharing with others. Users who accidentally or unknowingly allow their private or personal files to be shared risk disclosing their private information to other users on the network. In this

Document properties are a compelling infrastructure on which to develop document management applications. A property-based approach avoids many of the problems of traditional hierarchical storage mechanisms, reflects document organizations meaningful to user tasks, provides a means to integrate the perspectives of multiple individuals and groups, and does this all within a uniform interaction framework. Document properties can reflect not only categorizations of documents and document use, but also expressions of desired system activity, such as sharing criteria, replication management and versioning. Augmenting property-based document management systems with active properties that carry executable code enables the provision of document-based services on a property infrastructure. The combination of document properties as a uniform mechanism for document management, and active properties as a way of delivering document services, represents a new paradigm for document management infras...

This paper reports on TaskTracer — a software system being designed to help highly multitasking knowledge workers rapidly locate, discover, and reuse past processes they used to successfully complete tasks. The system monitors users ’ interaction with a computer, collects detailed records of users ’ activities and resources accessed, associates (automatically or with users ’ assistance) each interaction event with a particular task, enables users to access records of past activities and quickly restore task contexts. We present a novel Publisher-Subscriber architecture for collecting and processing users ’ activity data, describe several different user interfaces tried with TaskTracer, and discuss the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to recognize/predict users ’ tasks.

Organizations, families, institutions evolve a shared culture and history. In this work, we describe a system to facilitate conversation and storytelling about this collective past. Users explore digital archives of shared materials such as photographs, video, and text documents on a tabletop interface. Both the software and the interface encourage natural conversation and reflection. This work is an application of our ongoing research on systems for multiple, co-present users to explore digital collections. In this paper, we present a case study of our own group history along with the software extensions developed for this scenario. These extensions include methods for easily branching off from and returning to previous threads of the exploration, incorporating background contexts that support a variety of view points and flexible story sharing, and supporting the active and passive discovery of relevant information.

Medical care involves intense collaboration amongst a number of practitioners including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists Their work is concentrated on a single patient, and yet their activities, motivations, and concerns are very different We explore the use of a shared information system in helping these individuals coordinate their work In particular, we use the idea of a common information space to explore how the shared information is incorporated into the diverse work practices of an intensive care unit In addition to physical co-location, we found that providing information in many specialised representations is critical to managing their coordination. Unlike paper records, computer systems offer the ability to decouple information from its representations. This decoupling opens up a rich design space for systems that allow people with different interests, concerns and work practices to work together effectively.

People increasingly use multiple devices and Internet services to manage and share information. Since portable devices have limited resources for storage and bandwidth, it is essential to take advantage of proximity and selected replication of content. To this end we present Cimbiosys, a replication platform that permits each device to define its own content-based filtering criteria and to share updates with any other device. Cimbiosys ensures two properties not achieved by previous systems. First, every device stores exactly those items whose latest version meets arbitrary filter criteria that are independent of any hierarchical namespace. Second, every device represents its metadata in a compact form, with state proportional to the number of devices rather than the number of items. Such compact representation enables low synchronization overhead, which permits frequent synchronization even for bandwidthlimited devices. We have implemented Cimbiosys in C # and Mace. We evaluated the performance of the CIM Sync protocol in both simulation and using the Mace implementation. 1

Search systems can alleviate the need to organize personal information by helping us find it no matter where we encountered it, what we remember about it, and even if we forget it exists. Delia wants to set up a lunch meeting at a restaurant her brother had recommended last week in an email message. She should be able to find the address using one of several organizational schemes she has developed to help her manage the vast quantity of paper and electronic information she receives every day. She knows she copied information about the restaurant into her address book, but she’s not sure of the restaurant’s name, making it difficult to look it up directly. She’s not sure whether she filed the message in a folder relating to the main topic of her brother’s email message or left 58 January 2006/Vol. 49, No. 1 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM it in her inbox. since she still needs to respond to him.

Systems for fast search of personal information are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Such systems promise to dramatically improve personal information management, yet most are modeled on Web search in which users know very little about the content that they are searching. We describe the design and deployment of a system called Phlat that optimizes search for personal information with an intuitive interface that merges search and browsing through a variety of associative and contextual cues. In addition, Phlat supports a unified tagging (labeling) scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems (files, email, etc.). The system has been deployed to hundreds of employees within our organization. We report on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of system use. Phlat is available as a free download at

This study deals with the problems users encounter in their daily work with computers and the typical practices that they employ. Sixteen daily computer users were interviewed about their habits and problems that they encountered during document classification and retrieval. For both these areas, we provide an overview of identified user practices and a citation-based analysis of the problems users encountered, including those related to the use of the screen real estate (the actual desktop). Two types of problems were identified: (1) Problems that concern the actual use of the system installed on the computer. (2) Problems that arise when people realise that they are using a system that does not allow for the desired work or organizational functions sought. We were able to show that skill continues to be an important factor with respect to the ease of using today’s systems. We suggest the following necessary improvements for the evolution of personal information systems: A storage facility that represents the user’s view of information; replacing pure technical file metadata with more user-friendly attributes; and introduction of annotations as a new information type.