Personal Information Management: Stuff I've Seen and Beyond

Most information retrieval technologies are designed to facilitate information discovery. However, much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously seen information in the context of ongoing work activities. We have developed a prototype system called Stuff I’ve Seen (SIS) to support information re-use. The system provides a unified index to information that a person has seen, regardless of whether the information was seen as an email, appointment, web page, document, or hand-written note. Because the information has been seen before, rich contextual cues and visualizations (including timelines and memory landmarks) can be used to present search results. The system also provides a test bed for exploring ideas about meta-data driven retrieval and about techniques for supporting information management in the richer context of ongoing work activities.