Semantically Reconnecting Fragmented Information through User Activity Monitoring

Abstract

Today information items on user’s workstations are usuallystored in separate collections depending on their format.This results in a disconnect between information systemsand user needs leading to high lookup times during task relatedinformation retrieval. This paper presents an approachto reduce document based information fragmentation by semanticallyreconnecting electronic documents to each otherwithout imposing additional training or tagging workloadon the user. To this end the actions knowledge workers performon their desktop are transparently monitored to analyzethe user’s interaction with his computer system. Theseaction metadata are further clustered by superordinate activitiesperformed by the user. Finally documents attachedto window instances within the identified activity clustersare semantically to each other related reducing the fragmentationof their contained information. This allows a subsequentassociative information discovery navigating from onedocument instance to other related document instances. Aprototypical implementation and evaluation in a small scaletesting setup indicates the validity of the approach

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