Don't Search, Just Show Me What I Did: Visualizing Provenance of Documents and Applications

Computer documents have evolved over time. As a result, this article presents the results from a survey that redefines what a “document” is. The study discovered that people think a document is something that holds information; is manipulated by people (not the system); and is anything that can be seen, heard, or touched. Second, based on the results of the survey, we present a novel, real-time visualization tool that shows the results of nonintrusive tracking of documents and applications for a 6-month period. The tool focuses on document provenance—the history or genealogy of a document. It shows every document and application used as well as what happened to those documents (e.g., if the documents were moved, renamed, and/or deleted). These evaluations of the visualization tool are promising in that it helped with refinding documents, finding behavior workflow patterns, finding insight into general document usage, and performing forensic-type activities.

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