Supporting storage and retrieval of computer and human activity

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture we designed and constructed to support the storage and retrieval of human and computer activity. We collect information about activities occurring in the real physical world as well as information relating to activities occurring within a computer environment. Important information regarding such activities is digitally represented through paramertised asynchronous events, denoting, for example, workstation operations like manipulation of files and launching of applications, or tracking of users' physical movements, usage of the telephone system, taking books from the library, etc. Our past experience has demonstrated how using events as the glue to build distributed active systems simplifies the construction of complex applications, and enables legacy stand-alone components to be rapidly integated within a larger collaborative environment. Our motivation for storing events is that events can represent indexing points into activities and enable an activity to be reconstructed or replayed. This is particularly useful for capture of online collaboration, automated diary generation, memory recollection environments, and novel scenarios like visualisation and analysis of user mobility. We have designed and authored an event repository architecture that provides powerful search and retrieval facilities, enabling extraction of behaviour patterns, searching for simple and composite occurrences, and replay of stored sequences.