Collecting and analysing personal information management data

Abstract

Personal Information Management (PIM) research has investigated the information trail generated by an individual while performing some information-seeking task on their desktop, with the aim of improving PIM tool-support. Nevertheless, due to the personal nature of the data, this is rarely released for reuse. Furthermore, there exists no tool that allows a PIM researcher to investigate how PIM related data evolves over time nor one that allows for the results of applying different approaches over such data to be analysed. In this paper, we present the Personal Information Management Analytix framework (PiMx) that leverages upon a graph-analytics approach for the analysis and visualisation of evolving activity-data generated by individuals performing tasks on their desktops. We further describe a data collection methodology that opens up the data for reuse and briefly discuss how PiMx is used to analyse such a collection.