A Study of Exploration of Heterogeneous Personal Data Collected from Mobile Devices and Web Services

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the exploration of heterogeneous personal data that are collected from daily life. Most lifelog research has focused on the capture of personal logs and personal data archives. Although large amounts of personal data can be collected, it is not easy to find effective methods of reusing these data. Our research focuses on helping users recall and reminisce past events with an interactive system that enables them to explore personal data from several viewpoints. These viewpoints and corresponding views are described with a zooming user interface. We also illustrate a summary of personal data and landmarks that trigger memory recall. These concepts and user interfaces are implemented in a prototype system designed for exploring a variety of personal data including photographs, GPS histories, Tweets, and the number of steps people walk.

Aggregation and exploration of heterogeneous data collected from diverse information sources

“…The author previously proposed an organizational structure, especially for visual exploration of data [9]. In this research, the collected data include the following.…”

“…An effective navigation system is essential to enable interaction with a large amount of data from a user's point of view. Therefore, a navigational structure and a temporal zooming user interfaces were proposed for heterogeneous data [9].…”

“…The time axis was treated as a major attribute for the organization of data. We have also studied summaries and landmarks to visualize a large amount of data [9]. Summaries are like digests of daily life, and landmarks provide cues for remembering experiences.…”

“…The change in scale for each viewpoint corresponds to changes in time (time), geographical region (location), and groups of people (people). We studied six types of landmarks, user-generated data, locations, people, tags, characteristic values (e.g., outliers), and public data (e.g., news headlines) [9]. The summary contains these landmarks.…”

“…We have studied the organization and exploration of personal data from diverse information sources from a user's point of view [9], and visual interfaces have been developed to interact with the data. Interactive visual interface techniques, including information visualization, visual data mining, and visual analytics, have huge potential for exploring and analyzing the vast volumes of heterogeneous data [2,7,12].…”