LifeBook: A Mobile Personal Information Management System on the Cloud

Abstract

In this paper, we present LifeBook, a Personal Information Management (PIM) system that handles information on events captured by all the user's devices. Our PIM retrieves events on the basis of both the user's context and event similarity, which is computed by exploiting an information retrieval technique. We aggregated together the similarity of content, location, time, and event type to relate and surf the events. To this aim, we propose a re-find interface enabling the user to search and visualize information already seen before, of which he remembers some context aspects, such as time and/or place. The events captured on different devices are stored on the cloud without user intervention. A preliminary quantitative and qualitative evaluation has been also conducted to assess the effectiveness of LifeBook. Results in terms of time, effort and relevance of the information provided suggest that LifeBook be a viable means to retrieve personal information. Participants in the empirical investigation also considered the tool appropriate for supporting information re-finding tasks.