Paper contribution to Triple-I 07, Austria

Leo Sauermann presented our co-authored paper entitled:“From Philosophy and Mental-Models to Semantic Desktop
research: Theoretical Overview” at I-Semantics’07 at Graz, Austria.

Read Leo’s experiences at Triple-I Conference on his Blog

PIM Workshop 2008 Florence, Italy

PIM workshop is now going to be held in EU continent 🙂 (April 5-6, 2008, Florence, Italy), it’s a great opportunity for those concerned with basic and state-of-the-art research in PIM. A little known research area in past couple of years, now maturing to be a scientific discipline. Since the phase of my Master’s Thesis (see previous post), I always wondered for such an event to be held in Europe like the one held in Seattle last year.

Personal information management (PIM) is the practice and study of the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday use. PIM is a growing area of interest as we all strive for better use of our limited personal resources of time, money, and energy, as well as greater workplace efficiency and productivity. Good research on the topic is being done in several disciplines, including human-computer interaction, database management, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence. This two-day workshop will continue momentum towards building a community of researchers doing PIM-related research. See workshop page

This is specially a chance for Semantic Desktop researchers to get collaborated. I would suggest why not we plan a tutorial session of the experiences of Semantic Desktop Hack with the PIM workshop. This would bring some serious insights of PIM research results in view of fast and exciting happenings in Semantic Web applications area.

Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support PIM

The proper and immediate object of science, is the acquirement, or communication, of truth […]
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Definitions of Poetry, 1811

Inspired by the quote here i intend to publish my Masters thesis. The title of my Masters’ Thesis is: “Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support Personal Information Management“. It is submitted now at the Institute of Cognitive Science.

Many thanks to Leo Sauermann for his close supervision, constant support and valuable inputs to realize the work.

The abstract :

This thesis examines issues on Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Science and Mental Models. The research provides a philosophical grounding for the researchers in Personal Information Management (PIM). An overview is given on various philosophical aspects of computer-based activities. Discussions on the theories relevant to understand the goals for the Semantic Desktop community are elicited. The ideas discussed in the thesis are intended to emphasize a theoretical foundation, with respect to the Semantic Desktop long term goals. The goal of this thesis is to examine the theories of Philosophy and to provide a conceptual idea to design user-intuitive Semantic Desktop applications. The challenges of the Semantic Desktop evaluation are highlighted and suggestions are made based on Gnowsis evaluation. The work tries to induce scientific curiosity among the Semantic Desktop researchers.

Download as [ pdf ] size ~1 MB

See related publications

The myth of my Research

…I am currently fixated with my Masters Thesis entitled: [Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to support Personal Information Management]. It is challenging though interesting.

the main research motivation is based on the following questions :

• Does Semantic Desktop minimizes information overload by providing enhanced support to perform daily task of knowledge worker?

• Does it help in organising (personal) information, the way we think with respect to our working context?

• Does it able to formalize our mental models?

• Can we query and visualize our personal information resources (emails, files, contacts, photos) with the help of Semantic Desktop to know our meetings, schedules and tasks in order to organise ourselves better?

After realizing that Evaluation of Semantic Desktop remains still in its infancy and needs high attention, I don’t find any publications addressing the usability issues of Semantic Desktop. But now I am delighted to see some latest focus in Personal Information Management (PIM) research. The research has gained momentum with around 32 publications this year [look here] is quite interesting and for me it’s a light of hope that my current research efforts have some audience to appeal. My position to defend my work could be summed up briefly as follows:

1. PIM is not uniform or structuralised behaviour rather it is dynamic, diverse and flexible, based on context. PIM behaviour has to be studied in particular context (e.g. working, education, projects, research ). The strategy to study PIM behaviour would involve “divide and conquer”.
2. Evaluation of PIM is challenging, major issues involve privacy and users different world-view.
3. Understanding Mental Model, which is a hint (clue) in peoples mind to the concept they represent. In physical sense they may represent an operation of a device, In abstract sense they may represent system process. Mental Model could be used to explicitly define user working scenario to study her PIM activity.
4. Representing Mental model in [PIMO] as proposed by my scientific advisor Leo Sauermann or [CDS] as proposed by Max and Heiko : where mental model needs to be formalised, they should serve as an analytical tool that should provide features to document user’s current mental images, ideas and concepts.