Personal chronicling tools for enhancing information archival and collaboration in enterprises

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges in enterprises today is the lack of dynamic and ongoing information about individuals' activities, interests, and expertise. Availability of such "personal chronicles" can provide rich benefits at both an individual and enterprise level. For example, personal chronicles can help individuals to far more effectively retrieve and review their activities and interactions, while at an enterprise level they can be data-mined to identify groups of common and complementary interests and skills, or to identify implicit work processes that are commonplace in every enterprise. Today's existing tools are very limited in their support for dynamic capture of ongoing activities, in the organization and presentation of captured information, and in supporting rich annotation, search, retrieval, and publication of this information. In this paper, we propose a set of Personal Chronicling Tools (PCT) to support enterprise knowledge workers in digital event archiving and collaboration-oriented publishing. PCT is composed of four primary tools with the following capabilities: (1) event monitoring, (2) interactive annotation, (3) browse/search, and (4) edit/publish. All are designed to exploit existing enterprise infrastructure, storing captured raw data and metadata in secure databases. The first tool is a group of event monitors. These run on user client devices and capture user events such as emails, web pages browsed, instant messaging sessions, and documents edited. Monitors for new event classes are easily added as plug-ins through an XML interface. The second tool, the event annotator, enables context-sensitive user tagging and book marking of interesting moments. The third is an event browser which extends corporate email tools, providing semantic search (by embedding WordNet as a common dictionary) and the ability to follow threads of many kinds. Finally, a publishing tool facilitates the publication of relevant events with a fraction of the effort required to maintain a manual chronicle such as a weblog. This paper presents the overall system architecture, and a prototype implementation. Copyright 2004 ACM.