Personal Information Management (PIM) studies the practice of storing, organizing, and retrieving information by an individual in support of their roles and tasks (Bergman, et al., 2004). One important problem in PIM is information fragmentation (IF) — the condition of having data in different formats, distributed across multiple locations, manipulated by different applications, and residing in a generally disconnected manner (Tungare, 2007). IF can conflict with the PIM ideal that users should have access to the right information at the right time, in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to perform the task at hand (Bergman, et al., 2004). It is typically assumed that IF is unintentional, and occurs as a result of the many applications and devices we use to do our daily work. It is further assumed that IF is "bad" or has negative consequences. In this thesis, I study when IF occurs intentionally. Intentional IF (IIF) refers to the fragmentation in PIM that occurs when a person fragments his or her own personal data purposefully. Although research into the problem of IF has been growing quickly in the past decade, IIF has not been investigated in the literature. Prior studies have portrayed IF as a problematic type of information management. Email is a common context in which IF is found. While IF in email may be unintentional, such as when required by an employer, it is also likely to be intentional, as is the case when users use separate email accounts for different purposes. To further the research in this field, this project investigated the phenomenon of IIF in email by conducting and analyzing data from an online survey. In addition to finding the extent of IIF in email, the survey addressed what motivates the participant to purposely fragment their email as well as the advantages and disadvantages in doing so. My study is the first that has explored intentional fragmentation of information. The findings of this study show that IIF exists in email usage, revealing that IIF occurs across a user's devices and also across a user's multiple email accounts. The two most common motivations for IIF are to keep information separated by the user's social roles (work, school, personal communications, etc.), and to filter out extraneous information in order to simplify their information management. These results show that in addition to the negative consequences of IF there also exists positive uses of IF, that is helpful for some users. / Master of Science

Email has become deeply embedded in many users' daily lives. To investigate how email features in users lives, particularly how users attend to email and get lost within it, I ran five studies that probed how users determined relevancy of messages, logged interactions with email, gathered diary entries related to individual sessions, and investigated the gratifications sought from email use. For the first study, I performed an exploratory experiment in the laboratory to determine how participants assessed the importance of individual emails (N=10). The next investigation I undertook involved three different studies, which I detail individually: a survey on email usage (N=54); a two-week study of email usage (N=20); and finally, the application of Attentional Network Test (N=9). My final study was to validate my findings around the reasons for attending to email, this was done through deploying a survey that followed the Uses and Gratification Theory tradition (N=52) In my studies I found that the majority of attentional effort is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management. I also found that participants attended to email primarily based on notifications, instead of the number of unread messages in their inbox. I present my results through answering several research questions, and leverage Conversation Analysis (CA), particularly conversation openings, to explicate several problematic aspects around email use. My findings point to inefficiencies in email as a communication medium, mainly, around how summons are (or are not) issued. This results in an increased burden on email users to maintain engagement and determine (or construct) the appropriate moment for interruption. My findings have several implications: email triage does not seem to be problematic for the participants in my studies, somewhat in contrast to previous research; much of the problem around email, particularly emph{getting lost in email} is in managing the tension between promptly responding to messages while limiting engagement with email; due to the social nature of the problems with email, modifications to the email client are limited in their potential effectiveness to prevent getting lost and reduce email related anxiety. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 232-236). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-227). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-179).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-169).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-71).

The increasing number of devices owned by a single user makes it increasingly difficult to access, organise and visualise personal information (PI), i.e. documents and media, across these devices. The primary method that is currently used to organise and visualise PI is the hierarchical folder structure, which is a familiar and widely used means to manage PI. However, this hierarchy does not effectively support personal information management (PIM) across multiple devices. Current solutions, such as the Personal Information Dashboard and Stuff I’ve Seen, do not support PIM across multiple devices. Alternative PIM tools, such as Dropbox and TeamViewer, attempt to provide a means of accessing PI across multiple devices, but these solutions also suffer from several limitations. The aim of this research was to investigate to what extent enhanced information visualisation (IV) techniques could be used to support accessing PI across multiple devices. An interview study was conducted to identify how PI is currently managed across multiple devices. This interview study further motivated the need for a tool to support visualising PI across multiple devices and identified requirements for such an IV tool. Several suitable IV techniques were selected and enhanced to support PIM across multiple devices. These techniques comprised an Overview using a nested circles layout, a Tag Cloud and a Partition Layout, which used a novel set-based technique. A prototype, called MyPSI, was designed and implemented incorporating these enhanced IV techniques. The requirements and design of the MyPSI prototype were validated using a conceptual walkthrough. The design of the MyPSI prototype was initially implemented for a desktop or laptop device with mouse-based interaction. A sample personal space of information (PSI) was used to evaluate the prototype in a controlled user study. The user study was used to identify any usability problems with the MyPSI prototype. The results were highly positive and the participants agreed that such a tool could be useful in future. No major problems were identified with the prototype. The MyPSI prototype was then implemented on a mobile device, specifically an Android tablet device, using a similar design, but supporting touch-based interaction. Users were allowed to upload their own PSI using Dropbox, which was visualised by the MyPSI prototype. A field study was conducted following the Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case Studies approach specifically designed for IV evaluation. The field study was conducted over a two-week period, evaluating both the desktop and mobile versions of the MyPSI prototype. Both versions received positive results, but the desktop version was slightly preferred over the mobile version, mainly due to familiarity and problems experienced with the mobile implementation. Design recommendations were derived to inform future designs of IV tools to support accessing PI across multiple devices. This research has shown that IV techniques can be enhanced to effectively support accessing PI across multiple devices. Future work will involve customising the MyPSI prototype for mobile phones and supporting additional platforms.

The web browser has emerged as a central workspace for information workers, where they make use of cloud-based applications to access their information. While this solution nicely supports access to their data from multiple devices, it presents a nightmare for organizing and coordinating data between tools for a single project. Information is typically scattered between various online tools, where storage and organization structures are replicated. Information workers are interrupted and have to switch between projects frequently. Once interrupted, resuming work on a project can be hard. To address this information fragmentation and the impact of work interruptions, I created Contextinator, a personal information manager for the web browser that lets information workers organize their work activity and information into projects. Contextinator assists in coordinating information for projects, thereby ameliorating information fragmentation for projects that live on the cloud. It assists information workers in context switching and resuming work after interruptions. In my the- sis, I describe the problem of information fragmentation in the cloud. I discuss the different areas of related work of Personal Information Management, the design of Contextinator and how it is grounded in previous research. I briefly discuss how Contextinator is implemented. I then present the results from my field-evaluation of Contextinator. Finally, I conclude by discussing future work in this research. / Master of Science

Die Verwaltung persönlicher, multimedialer Dokumente kann mit Hilfe semantischer Technologien und Ontologien intelligent und effektiv unterstützt werden. Dies setzt jedoch Verfahren voraus, die den grundlegenden Annotations- und Bearbeitungsaufwand für den Anwender minimieren und dabei eine ausreichende Datenqualität und -konsistenz sicherstellen. Im Rahmen der Dissertation wurden notwendige Mechanismen zur semi-automatischen Modellierung und Wartung semantischer Dokumentenbeschreibungen spezifiziert. Diese bildeten die Grundlage für den Entwurf einer komponentenbasierten, anwendungsunabhängigen Architektur als Basis für die Entwicklung innovativer, semantikbasierter Lösungen zur persönlichen Dokumenten- und Wissensverwaltung. / Personal multimedia document management benefits from Semantic Web technologies and the application of ontologies. However, an ontology-based document management system has to meet a number of challenges regarding flexibility, soundness, and controllability of the semantic data model. The first part of the dissertation proposes necessary mechanisms for the semi-automatic modeling and maintenance of semantic document descriptions. The second part introduces a component-based, application-independent architecture which forms the basis for the development of innovative, semantic-driven solutions for personal document and information management.