On Querying and Exploring Activities on a User’s Desktop

Abstract

Many desktop query and management systems offer an object oriented view of a computer, where the emphasis is on describing the information relevant to an object. However, objects may be related to each other in different ways and in different contexts. In this paper, we argue that users create and modify data as a function of activities they are involved in. We develop methods to explore objects on a desktop through activities. Our methods integrate discovered relationships between data objects based on their participation in different activities as well as other properties. Our activity model is well suited to support a query language that is able to alter the context and the definition of an activity to easily visualize complex relationships in data. We show that this new organization makes many new interesting desktop functionalities a reality.