Information-behaviour modeling with external cues

• Authors: Michael Huggett
• Venue: SIGIR '07 Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
• Year: 2007

Much of human activity defines an information context. We awaken, start work, and hold meetings at roughly the same time every day, and retrieve the same information items (day planners, itineraries, schedules, agendas, reports, menus, web pages, etc.) for many of these activities. Information retrieval systems in general lack sensitivity to such recurrent context, requiring users to remember and re-enter search cues for objects regardless of how regularly or consistently the objects are used, and to develop ad-hoc storage strategies. We propose that in addition to semantic cues, information objects should also be indexed by temporal and sensory cues, such as clock time and location, so that objects can be retrieved by external environmental context, in addition to any internal semantic content. Our cue-event-object (CEO) model uses a network representation to associate information objects with the times and conditions (location, weather, etc.) when they are typically used. Users can query the system to review their activities, revealing what they do at particular times, and which information objects tend to be most often used and when. The system can also pre-fetch items that have proven useful in past similar situations. The CEO model is incremental, real-time, and dynamic, maintaining an accurate summary even as a user's information behaviour changes over time. Such environmentally-aware systems have applications in personal information management, mobile devices, and smart homes. As a memory prosthesis, the model can support autonomous living for the cognitively impaired. We present a comprehensive research agenda based on some promising preliminary findings.