Operation record based work events grouping method for personal information management system

Abstract

In order to improve the efficiency of any business, it is now very important to reuse knowledge by accumulating it in a computer. We propose a method that accumulates and reuses knowledge of work by automatically extracting it from a user's operation records during ordinary use on a Personal Information Management system (PIM). We assume that related work events on the PIM are input and referred to consecutively by the user. Our method that extracts available knowledge constructs a workflow by grouping all related events and detecting milestones based on the time and order of operating target events. Usually, reference to events is the user's viewing of events on the calendar without involving operations, so recording a target event and time of reference is difficult. In order to record the user's reference behavior exactly, we introduce a balloon-help-based function for event reference support.

Organizing and visualizing related work events on personal information management systems

“…In order to record the user's reference behavior, we introduced a balloon-help function (as the solid ellipse in Fig.1) for support of reference to detail information of an event. We ran a trial prototype PIM with this function, and confirmed [3] that our method can record a user's reference actions efficiently.…”

“…Furthermore, we identify which groups are work projects as distinct from individual events (such as Fig.3(a) events No. 3 and No.10-11) by deleting isolated circles and connected components of circles with less than our chosen value ( Fig.3(b)). …”