Personal Information Management

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain and retrieve information for everyday use. One ideal of PIM is that we always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet our current need. Tools and technologies help us spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone actions of information management (such as filing). We then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done.

This ideal is far from the reality for most people. A wide range of tools and technologies are now available for the management of personal information. But this diversity has become part of the problem leading to information fragmentation. A person may maintain several separate, roughly comparable but inevitably inconsistent, organizational schemes for electronic documents, paper documents, email messages and web references. The number of organizational schemes may increase if a person has several email accounts, uses separate computers for home and work, uses a PDA or a smart phone, or uses any of a bewildering number of special-purpose PIM tools.

We are exploring the research issues in PIM on searching, managing, analyzing and mining personal information particularly their email messages in collaboration with Universities in China.

Current Project

Personal Information Management for Email - Collaborated with Renmin University and Fudan University

Email is one of the most successful PIM applications ever developed. IDC estimates that the size of business email volumes sent annually worldwide in 2007 will approach 5 billion gigabytes, nearly doubling the amount over the past two years. However, recent research has identified significant problems with email. Users complain about feeling overwhelmed by the volume of messages they receive. They have difficulties in organizing and managing their email data, in particular hard to find the personal information generated one year or two years before. In addition, they have problems in using email to execute Tasks Management.

In the real life, user always find some email from his a large amount of email messages by some fragments of his memory, such as person involved, email sender, or some topic of the email. Therefore, we represent this memory fragment as entity, which contains person entity and topic entity. Our goal is to develop an entity-based personal email management system, which can help users better manage their emails and easily find the required information from multi point of user's view. This system annotates email with entity and models emails and their relationship by a graph model. Therefore, it can support the management and retrieve of emails based on the structure, entity and keyword information. Also, this system can automatically extract and mining important tasks by analyzing the content of user's emails and then deliver the reminding when necessary.

Research Topics:

• Email Extraction and Mining -- Renmin University

• Email Search and Query -- Fudan University

A podcast presentation of this project

Our Visions on PIM

• Email Overload: State of Arts

• Email and PIM: Problems and Possibilities

• Search and Query on Personal Information

• Personal DataSpace Management System

• From Databases to Dataspaces: A New Abstract for Information Management

PIM-related Work

These years, PIM has become a very hot topic in University and Research Institutes. There are a lot of related project and systems, workshops and conferences.

• Related projects and systems

• Related conferences and books

Comments