Presonal Information Management resouces - User contributions [en]

Visualizing large hierarchies

2012-02-23T12:06:22Z

Spamuser:

==Visualizing large hierarchies==

Besides lines and nodes (the way file hierarchies are presented in today's file managers) and indented outlines (like the table of content of a document) there are several other (large) hierarchy visualizations. Most of these visualizations do provide an overall view on a hierarchy but most are not suitable to manage personal information. Some of them focus only one aspect of information items (e.g. size) and do not provide enough contextual clues for easy performing [[PIM frameworks|pim activities]].

{|style="" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" border="0"
! width="33%"|
! width="33%"|
! width="33%"|
|- valign="top"
|* 3-dimensional cone trees <ref name="robertson">Robertson, George G., Card, Stuart K., and Mackinlay, Jock D., Information visualization using 3-D interactive animation, Communications of the ACM 36, 4 (April 1993), 56-71</ref>

[[File:Tree-cone_tree.png‎|center|border|200px|Figure 1: The cone tree]]

|* fviz (improved cone trees or a balloon view of radial trees) <ref name="carriere">Carriere, Jeremy and Kazman, Rick, Interacting with huge hierarchies: Beyond cone trees, Proc. IEEE Information Visualization '95, IEEE Computer Press, Los Alamitos, CA (1995), 74-81.</ref>

[[File:Tree-camtrees.png|center|border|200px|Figure 2: Cam tree]]

|* Dynamic pruning in the TreeBrowser with dynamic queries<ref name="kumard">Harsha Kumard, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman, Browsing Hierarchical Data with Multi-Level Dynamic Queries and Pruning, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 1995, 46, 103--124</ref>

[[File:Tree-treebrowser_pruning.png|center|border|200px|Figure 3: TreeBrowser with pruning by dynamic queries]]

|- valign="top"
|* Hyperbolic trees (+focus)<ref name="lamping">Lamping, John, Rao, Ramana, and Pirolli, Peter, A focus + context technique based on hyperbolic geometry for visualizing large hierarchies, Proc. of ACM CHI95 Conference: Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY (1995), 401-408</ref>

[[File:Tree-hyperbolic.png|center|border|200px|Figure 4: Hyperbolic tree]]

|* Treemap (1991) uses a size of files and visualizes them as rectangles where the biggest file takes the biggest space on screen [33]. This visualization is good to spot biggest files but not for everyday management. <ref name="johnson">Johnson, Brian, and Shneiderman, Ben, Tree-maps: A space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures, Proc. IEEE Visualization’91, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ (1991), 284–291.</ref>

[[File:Tree-treemap.png|center|border|200px|Figure 5: Treemap]]

|* StepTree - a 3D treemap to navigate large hierarchies <ref name="bladh">Bladh, Thomas and Carr, David A. and Kljun, Matjaz, The Effect of Animated Transitions on User Navigation in 3D Tree-Maps, IV '05: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information Visualisation, 2005, 297--305, IEEE Computer Society</ref>

[[File:Tree-steptree.png|center|border|200px|Figure 6: StepTree]]

|- valign="top"
|* Beamtrees<ref name="wijk">J. van Wijk, F. van Ham, and H. van de Wetering. Rendering hierarchical data. Communications of the ACM, 46(9):263, 2003.</ref>

[[File:Tree-beamtree.png|center|border|200px|Figure 7: Beamtree]]

|* Botanical Trees<ref name="wijk" />

[[File:Tree-botanicaltree.png|center|border|200px|Figure 8: Botanical tree]]

|rowspan="2"|* PhylloTrees<ref name="neumann">Petra Neumann, M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale and Anand Agarawala, PhylloTrees: Phyllotactic Patterns for Tree Layout, Proceedings of Eurographics / IEEE VGTC Symposium on Visualization, EuroVis 2006, Lisbon, Portugal</ref>

[[File:Tree-phylotree.png|center|border|200px|Figure 9: Phyllotree]]

|- valign="top"
|* Information cube (a nested box metaphor) <ref name="rekimoto">J. Rekimoto and M. Green, “The Information Cube: Using Transparency in 3D Information Visualization”, Proceedings of the Third Annual Workshop on Information Technologies & Systems (WITS’93), 1993.</ref>

[[File:Tree-informationcube.png|center|border|200px|Figure 10: Information cube]]

|* Fractal trees<ref name="koike">Hideki Koike and Hirotaka Yoshihara, Fractal Approaches for Visualizing Huge Hierarchies, In Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, 1993, 55--60</ref>

[[File:Tree-fractal.png|center|border|200px|Figure 11: Fractal tree]]

|- valign="top"
|* Circular trees<ref name="ciccarelli">Francesca D. One of my friends recommended me to order [http://www.essaysprofessors.com/custom-writing.html custom writing]on EssaysProfessors.Com. To tell you the truth, I have never regretted my decision. The writers are real professionals and know how to write impressive work full of knowledgeable information. Ciccarelli, Tobias Doerks, Christian von Mering, Christopher J. Creevey, Berend Snel, and Peer Bork1, Toward automatic reconstruction of a highly resolved tree of life, Science, vol. 311, no. 5765, pages 1283, 2006, AAAS</ref>

[[File:Tree-circular.png|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Circular tree]]

|* PolyPlane trees<ref name="hong">Seok-Hee Hong and Tom Murtagh, PolyPlane: A New Layout Algorithm For Trees In Three Dimensions, 2006</ref>

[[File:Tree-polyplane.png|center|border|200px|Figure 12: PolyPlane tree]]

|* Information slices: Visualising and Exploring Large Hierarchies using Cascading, Semi-Circular Discs<ref name="andrews">Keith Andrews, Helmut Heidegger. Information Slices: Visualising and Exploring Large Hierarchies using Cascading, Semi-Circular Discs. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis’98)</ref>

[[File:Tree-slices.png|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Information slices]]

|- valign="top"
|* Hierarchical Edge Bundles<ref name="holten">Danny Holten. Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 12, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2006</ref>

[[File:Tree-edge-bundles.png|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Information slices]]

|* Radial tree <ref name="radial">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_tree Wikipedia Radial tree article]</ref><ref name="book">Greg Book & Neeta Keshary. Radial Tree Graph Drawing Algorithm for Representing Large Hierarchies. University of Connecticut. 2001</ref>

[[File:Tree-radial.jpg|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Information slices]]

|* Disc Trees (plain disc trees and compact disc trees) (a variant of Cone trees)<ref name="disctree">Chang-Sung Jeong, Alex Pang. Reconfigurable Disc Trees for Visualizing Large Hierarchical Information Space. IEEE InfoVis. 1998.</ref>

[[File:Tree-disk.jpg|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Information slices]]

|- valign="top"
|* Cat-a-Cone <ref name="hearst">Marti A. Hearst, Chandu Karadi. Cat-a-Cone: An Interactive Interface for Specifying Searches and Viewing Retrieval Results using a Large Category Hierarchy. ACM/SIGIR 97</ref>

[[File:Tree-catacone.jpg|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Information slices]]

|* RF-Cone <ref name="teraoka">Teruhiko Teraoka, Minoru Maruyama. Adaptive Information Visualization Based on the User's Multiple Viewpoints - Interactive 3D Visualization of the WWW. IEEE InfoVis. 1997</ref>

[[File:Tree-rfcone.jpg|center|border|200px|Figure 13: Information slices]]

|* LyberWorld

|- valign="top"
|* Bubble tree <ref name="grivet">S. Grivet, D. Auber, J. P. Domenger and G. Melancon. Bubble Tree drawing algorithm. Computational Imaging and Vision, 2006</ref>

[[File:Tree-buubletree.png|center|border|200px|Figure 14: Bubble tree]]

|* Tree radial <ref name="grivet" />

[[File:Tree-treeradial.png|center|border|200px|Figure 15: Tree radial]]

|* Tree walker <ref name="grivet" />

[[File:Tree-treewalker.png|center|border|200px|Figure 16: Tree Walker]]

|}

Overview papers - Further reading:

Ivan Herman, Guy Melançon and M. Scott Marshall, Graph visualization and navigation in information visualization: A survey, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 24--43, 2000 [http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/courses/infovis/readings/hermann.pdf PDF]

Other visualization (related or not to hierarchies):

Ben Shneiderman, The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations, The craft of information visualization: readings and reflections, 364--371, 2003 [http://triton.towson.edu/~hhochhei/classes/spring07/686/Hochheiser-eyes.pdf PDF]

==Notes==
<references />

PIM frameworks

2011-11-17T17:39:55Z

Spamuser: /* Deborah Barreau */

==Deborah Barreau==

To understand how PIM is performed, [[Deborah Barreau]] tried to dismember it and so divided it in 5 sub- activities:<ref name="barreau">Deborah Barreau, Context as a factor in personal information management systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 5/46, 1995</ref>

* Acquisition: deciding which information will be included in information space, defining, la- belling and grouping information.
* Organization and Storage: classifying, naming, grouping and placing information for later retrieval.
* Maintenance: updating out-of-date information, backing up information, moving or deleting information from information space.
* Retrieval: process of finding information for reuse and • Output: visualizing the information space based on users’ needs and objectives.

Barreau's framework threats a PIM system as a monolithic system centered on a file hierarchy.

==Richard Boardman==

[[File:boardman-pim.png|thumb|Figure 1: PIM activities and activities outside PIM by Richard Boardman]]

Barreau's classification of PIM activities was a basis for [[Richard Boardman|Richard Boardman’s]] classification. Boardman argued that updating information content cannot be a part of PIM, as it deals with content of information items. He also argued that visualizing is done by computers (not users) and that visualization is present in all sub-activities.<ref name="boardman">Richard Boardman, 2004, Improving Tool Support for Personal Information Management, Doctoral dissertation, Imperial College, London</ref> He describes four PIM sub-activities as:

* Acquisition: naming and/or (deciding of a) placement in information space.
* Organization: placing information items, renaming, moving and creating new folders.
* Maintenance: backing up and deleting information from information space.
* Retrieval: browsing, sorting and searching for information.

This framework focuses on a computer as a set of several PIM systems (software applications) that allow a user to manage a [[PIM_definitions#Personal_Information_Collection|collection of personal information]] in a particular technological format

==Pamela Ravasio et. al.==

Ravasio et. al. exposed organization as the main aim of PIM <ref name="ravasio">Pamela Ravasio, Sissel Guttormsen Schr and Helmut Krueger. In pursuit of desktop evolution: User problems and practices with modern desktop systems. ACM Trans. Comp.-Hum. Inter. 11(2):156-180, 2004</ref>. Based on Lansdale's paper <ref name="lansdale">Mark Lansdale. 1988. The psychology of personal information management. Applied ergonomics, 19(1:55-66.</ref> they proposed four underlying tasks that users accomplish during organization:

* information handling
* categorization
* filing and
* retrieval

where ''categorization and filing'' are ''information classification'' and ''retrieval'' is ''information searching''

==William Jones and James Teevan==

[[File:Jones-pim.png|thumb|right|Figure 2: PIM activities viewed as an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping between needs and information]]

[[William Jones|Jones]] and [[Jaime Teevan|Teevan]] devided all PIM activities in three main groups that support our needs in correlation to information:

* '''Keeping activities''': decisions focused on a single information item about the future needs and future availability.
* '''(Re)finding activities''': driven by our needs for information in PSI.
* '''Meta-level activities''': maintenance (composition and preservation) and organization (selection and implementation of a scheme) of the PIC within PSI, managing privacy, evaluating PSI, making sense of information and information distribution.

The first group of activities is focused on the flow from information to our needs and the second group on the flow from our needs to information. All other activities support both flows as can be seen in Figure 2.<ref name="jonesteevan">William Jones and James Teevan, editors. Personal Information Management. University of Washington Press, 2007</ref>

This framework is more general as [[Richard Boardman|Boardman's]] and [[Deborah Barreau|Barreau's]] and include the whole users' [[PIM_definitions#Personal_Space_of_Information|personal information space]]

Authors also explain these activities in more detailes:

'''Information seeking''': activities directed towards accessing information to satisfy our need or goals. Consider writing a paper: we have to find relevant papers of the subject and all activities involved in searching and finding these paper fall in this category.

'''Information keeping''': decisions and actions about an information item currently in consideration that affect later retrieval. This simply means that we have to decide either to discard information or to keep in and how to keep it. Consider the above example of papers: we visit many web pages with papers and for each one we decide to leave it (discard it because it is not relevant or we think we will easily find it in the future), but some web pages are of great interest (for a paper) and we save them as web bookmarks, print them, save them in a special reference format (e.g. bibtex) ... These activities happen very often and focus is on one information item.

'''Refinding information''': the process of finding information that has been seen before.

'''Information organizing''': decisions and actions about information schema for a collection of information items. This means that we have to decide how to organize a personal information collection to make sense to us. Consider writing a paper: we have to organize references, have to decide on a format (e.g. Bibtex), decide on a software (e.g. BibDesk), decide how to name references (e.g. author's last name, year and first word of a title: jones2008personal, structure, tag, annotate ... These activities happen sporadically and their focus is on collection.

'''Information Maintaining''': decisions and actions about composition and preservation of personal information collection. Consider references from example above: we have to decide which new items are going in a collection, which have leave it, how to back up the collection ... These activities preserve the state and nature of a collection to serve us. Focus is again on a collection.

==Matjaž Kljun==

[[File:Kljun-pim.png|thumb|Figure 3: PIM activities and activities outside PIM by Richard Boardman]]

''Main article can be found '''[[PIM Framework - Matjaž Kljun|here]]'''''

This framework is based on [[Richard Boardman|Bordman's]] and it includes four PIM sub-activities: '''acquiring''', '''organizing''', '''maintaining''' and '''retrieving'''. But it does not impose strict borders between PIM activities; rather '''it presumes that PIM activities overlap''' (not only happen interchangeably) as can be seen in Figure 3. <ref name="kljun">Matjaž Kljun, Alan Dix and Franc Solina. A Study of a Crosstool Information Usage on Personal Computers: how users mentally link information relating to a task but residing in different applications and how importance and type of acquisition affect this. 2009 [http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/33816/1/kljun-crosstool_information_usage_2009.pdf PDF]</ref>

Its starting point is on '''different acquisition types which influences all other activities'''. It tries to frame for example such issues: an email that is automatically acquired and placed in our inbox which is for example our personal information collection; is deleting this email a keeping activity as we process new email messages and decide which we will keep or discard; or is deleting maintaining as we decide which information stays in the collection.

'''Acquisition'''

{| border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" align="center" width="95%" style="background-color: #eeeeee;"
|-----
| Acquisition can happen in three different ways: '''created''', '''received''' and '''found''' as can be seen in Figure 3. And each of these three sources can be acquired in several of these modes:

* Manually acquired information (created file, manually saved internet documents).
* Semi-automatically acquired information (emails we write that are saved automatically in sent folder, downloaded internet documents to a predefined folder) and
* Automatically acquired information (received emails, RSS feeds).

We have a total control over manually acquired information which can be (re)named and/or placed in information environment based on our decisions at the time we decide. On the other hand, automatically acquired information piles up in a predefined place while we do not have a control over its acquisition. While semi-automatically acquired information still needs our action to be acquired but some actions (like naming and placing, time of acquisition) can be done without our intervention (e.g automatically by an application).
|}

'''Organization'''

{| border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" align="center" width="95%" style="background-color: #eeeeee;"
|-----
| Users change organizational structure (even if only a small part) also during other activities and that many such small changes incrementally (while thinking and rethinking about small portions of the existing schema) change structure and organization of PICs and PSI. As such information organization overlaps with all other activities as can be seen in Figure 3.
|}

'''Maintenance'''

{| border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" align="center" width="95%" style="background-color: #eeeeee;"
|-----
| Maintenance is performed to support future (maybe unknown) needs and tasks. Maintaining means to manage the organizational schema in such a way that information related to past tasks, for which it is assessed that it will not be needed any more, is moved out of the way and the organizational schema is organized in a way to support future tasks while it still has to support ongoing tasks.
|}

Consider two tasks:
* Lets get this desk organized as a sporadic activity in comparison to
* Daily organizing email inbox (moving, filing or deleting items).
Both tasks include organizing. But first one is about moving piles of papers from a desk to make place for new ones and to support other future PIM activities (in the long run). While the second task is more about supporting present PIM activities (not get overflown with email on a daily bases). Certainly it also supports future PIM but is more focused in the present.

== Christina M. Finneran: the ''keeping information'' framework ==

[[File:Finneran-pim.png|thumb|Figure 4: Keeping activities framework]]

This framework (Figure 4) has incorporated key concepts from the hoarding literature.<ref name="finneran">Christina M. Finneran, Factors that influence users to leave, acquire, and retain information items: A case study of college students' Personal Information Management, Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008</ref> It is the refinement of the "keeping" concept. [[PIM_frameworks#William_Jones_and_James_Teevan|Keeping activities]] (as defined by Jones) are broken down into the:

* acquisition,
* discarding or compiling, and
* retention of information items.

Potential influences on keeping behavior from hoarding literature:

* hyper-sentiments about possessions
** emotional attachment to possessions
** memory
** control over possessions
** responsibility for possessions
* information processing deficits (attention, categorization, memory, and use of information to draw conclusions and make decisions)
* emotional distress and avoidance behavior, indecision (what to save, what to discard, and where to retain it)

Further reading on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding hoarding] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding compulsive hoarding] on Wikipedia.

== Yukon Li, David Elsweiler and Xiaofeng Meng ==

In regard to a TASK, these sholars define another term Personal Data Dtem (PDI). PDI is a the basic building block for a tasks. PDI is defined as an item which has been cre-ated, accessed or modified by a person and is the result of user interaction <ref name="li">Yukon Li, David Elsweiler and Xiaofeng Meng: Towards Task-Organized Desktop Collection. Workshop of the 33rd ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development of Information Retrieval. 2010</ref>. According to this definition, a file, an email or a folder can all be regarded as PDIs. What the definition also makes explicit is that PDIs only refer to items that the user has interacted with and that have not automatically been generated by software.

==Notes==
<references />

PIM frameworks

2011-11-17T17:38:50Z

Spamuser:

==Deborah Barreau==

To sunderstand how PIM is performed, [[Deborah Barreau]] tried to dismember it and so divided it in 5 sub- activities:<ref name="barreau">Deborah Barreau, Context as a factor in personal information management systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 5/46, 1995</ref>

* Acquisition: deciding which information will be included in information space, defining, la- belling and grouping information.
* Organization and Storage: classifying, naming, grouping and placing information for later retrieval.
* Maintenance: updating out-of-date information, backing up information, moving or deleting information from information space.
* Retrieval: process of finding information for reuse and • Output: visualizing the information space based on users’ needs and objectives.

Barreau's framework threats a PIM system as a monolithic system centered on a file hierarchy.

==Richard Boardman==

[[File:boardman-pim.png|thumb|Figure 1: PIM activities and activities outside PIM by Richard Boardman]]

Barreau's classification of PIM activities was a basis for [[Richard Boardman|Richard Boardman’s]] classification. Boardman argued that updating information content cannot be a part of PIM, as it deals with content of information items. He also argued that visualizing is done by computers (not users) and that visualization is present in all sub-activities.<ref name="boardman">Richard Boardman, 2004, Improving Tool Support for Personal Information Management, Doctoral dissertation, Imperial College, London</ref> He describes four PIM sub-activities as:

* Acquisition: naming and/or (deciding of a) placement in information space.
* Organization: placing information items, renaming, moving and creating new folders.
* Maintenance: backing up and deleting information from information space.
* Retrieval: browsing, sorting and searching for information.

This framework focuses on a computer as a set of several PIM systems (software applications) that allow a user to manage a [[PIM_definitions#Personal_Information_Collection|collection of personal information]] in a particular technological format

==Pamela Ravasio et. al.==

Ravasio et. al. exposed organization as the main aim of PIM <ref name="ravasio">Pamela Ravasio, Sissel Guttormsen Schr and Helmut Krueger. In pursuit of desktop evolution: User problems and practices with modern desktop systems. ACM Trans. Comp.-Hum. Inter. 11(2):156-180, 2004</ref>. Based on Lansdale's paper <ref name="lansdale">Mark Lansdale. 1988. The psychology of personal information management. Applied ergonomics, 19(1:55-66.</ref> they proposed four underlying tasks that users accomplish during organization:

* information handling
* categorization
* filing and
* retrieval

where ''categorization and filing'' are ''information classification'' and ''retrieval'' is ''information searching''

==William Jones and James Teevan==

[[File:Jones-pim.png|thumb|right|Figure 2: PIM activities viewed as an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping between needs and information]]

[[William Jones|Jones]] and [[Jaime Teevan|Teevan]] devided all PIM activities in three main groups that support our needs in correlation to information:

* '''Keeping activities''': decisions focused on a single information item about the future needs and future availability.
* '''(Re)finding activities''': driven by our needs for information in PSI.
* '''Meta-level activities''': maintenance (composition and preservation) and organization (selection and implementation of a scheme) of the PIC within PSI, managing privacy, evaluating PSI, making sense of information and information distribution.

The first group of activities is focused on the flow from information to our needs and the second group on the flow from our needs to information. All other activities support both flows as can be seen in Figure 2.<ref name="jonesteevan">William Jones and James Teevan, editors. Personal Information Management. University of Washington Press, 2007</ref>

This framework is more general as [[Richard Boardman|Boardman's]] and [[Deborah Barreau|Barreau's]] and include the whole users' [[PIM_definitions#Personal_Space_of_Information|personal information space]]

Authors also explain these activities in more detailes:

'''Information seeking''': activities directed towards accessing information to satisfy our need or goals. Consider writing a paper: we have to find relevant papers of the subject and all activities involved in searching and finding these paper fall in this category.

'''Information keeping''': decisions and actions about an information item currently in consideration that affect later retrieval. This simply means that we have to decide either to discard information or to keep in and how to keep it. Consider the above example of papers: we visit many web pages with papers and for each one we decide to leave it (discard it because it is not relevant or we think we will easily find it in the future), but some web pages are of great interest (for a paper) and we save them as web bookmarks, print them, save them in a special reference format (e.g. bibtex) ... These activities happen very often and focus is on one information item.

'''Refinding information''': the process of finding information that has been seen before.

'''Information organizing''': decisions and actions about information schema for a collection of information items. This means that we have to decide how to organize a personal information collection to make sense to us. Consider writing a paper: we have to organize references, have to decide on a format (e.g. Bibtex), decide on a software (e.g. BibDesk), decide how to name references (e.g. author's last name, year and first word of a title: jones2008personal, structure, tag, annotate ... These activities happen sporadically and their focus is on collection.

'''Information Maintaining''': decisions and actions about composition and preservation of personal information collection. Consider references from example above: we have to decide which new items are going in a collection, which have leave it, how to back up the collection ... These activities preserve the state and nature of a collection to serve us. Focus is again on a collection.

==Matjaž Kljun==

[[File:Kljun-pim.png|thumb|Figure 3: PIM activities and activities outside PIM by Richard Boardman]]

''Main article can be found '''[[PIM Framework - Matjaž Kljun|here]]'''''

This framework is based on [[Richard Boardman|Bordman's]] and it includes four PIM sub-activities: '''acquiring''', '''organizing''', '''maintaining''' and '''retrieving'''. But it does not impose strict borders between PIM activities; rather '''it presumes that PIM activities overlap''' (not only happen interchangeably) as can be seen in Figure 3. <ref name="kljun">Matjaž Kljun, Alan Dix and Franc Solina. A Study of a Crosstool Information Usage on Personal Computers: how users mentally link information relating to a task but residing in different applications and how importance and type of acquisition affect this. 2009 [http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/33816/1/kljun-crosstool_information_usage_2009.pdf PDF]</ref>

Its starting point is on '''different acquisition types which influences all other activities'''. It tries to frame for example such issues: an email that is automatically acquired and placed in our inbox which is for example our personal information collection; is deleting this email a keeping activity as we process new email messages and decide which we will keep or discard; or is deleting maintaining as we decide which information stays in the collection.

'''Acquisition'''

{| border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" align="center" width="95%" style="background-color: #eeeeee;"
|-----
| Acquisition can happen in three different ways: '''created''', '''received''' and '''found''' as can be seen in Figure 3. And each of these three sources can be acquired in several of these modes:

* Manually acquired information (created file, manually saved internet documents).
* Semi-automatically acquired information (emails we write that are saved automatically in sent folder, downloaded internet documents to a predefined folder) and
* Automatically acquired information (received emails, RSS feeds).

We have a total control over manually acquired information which can be (re)named and/or placed in information environment based on our decisions at the time we decide. On the other hand, automatically acquired information piles up in a predefined place while we do not have a control over its acquisition. While semi-automatically acquired information still needs our action to be acquired but some actions (like naming and placing, time of acquisition) can be done without our intervention (e.g automatically by an application).
|}

'''Organization'''

{| border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" align="center" width="95%" style="background-color: #eeeeee;"
|-----
| Users change organizational structure (even if only a small part) also during other activities and that many such small changes incrementally (while thinking and rethinking about small portions of the existing schema) change structure and organization of PICs and PSI. As such information organization overlaps with all other activities as can be seen in Figure 3.
|}

'''Maintenance'''

{| border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" align="center" width="95%" style="background-color: #eeeeee;"
|-----
| Maintenance is performed to support future (maybe unknown) needs and tasks. Maintaining means to manage the organizational schema in such a way that information related to past tasks, for which it is assessed that it will not be needed any more, is moved out of the way and the organizational schema is organized in a way to support future tasks while it still has to support ongoing tasks.
|}

Consider two tasks:
* Lets get this desk organized as a sporadic activity in comparison to
* Daily organizing email inbox (moving, filing or deleting items).
Both tasks include organizing. But first one is about moving piles of papers from a desk to make place for new ones and to support other future PIM activities (in the long run). While the second task is more about supporting present PIM activities (not get overflown with email on a daily bases). Certainly it also supports future PIM but is more focused in the present.

== Christina M. Finneran: the ''keeping information'' framework ==

[[File:Finneran-pim.png|thumb|Figure 4: Keeping activities framework]]

This framework (Figure 4) has incorporated key concepts from the hoarding literature.<ref name="finneran">Christina M. Finneran, Factors that influence users to leave, acquire, and retain information items: A case study of college students' Personal Information Management, Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008</ref> It is the refinement of the "keeping" concept. [[PIM_frameworks#William_Jones_and_James_Teevan|Keeping activities]] (as defined by Jones) are broken down into the:

* acquisition,
* discarding or compiling, and
* retention of information items.

Potential influences on keeping behavior from hoarding literature:

* hyper-sentiments about possessions
** emotional attachment to possessions
** memory
** control over possessions
** responsibility for possessions
* information processing deficits (attention, categorization, memory, and use of information to draw conclusions and make decisions)
* emotional distress and avoidance behavior, indecision (what to save, what to discard, and where to retain it)

Further reading on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding hoarding] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding compulsive hoarding] on Wikipedia.

== Yukon Li, David Elsweiler and Xiaofeng Meng ==

In regard to a TASK, these sholars define another term Personal Data Dtem (PDI). PDI is a the basic building block for a tasks. PDI is defined as an item which has been cre-ated, accessed or modified by a person and is the result of user interaction <ref name="li">Yukon Li, David Elsweiler and Xiaofeng Meng: Towards Task-Organized Desktop Collection. Workshop of the 33rd ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development of Information Retrieval. 2010</ref>. According to this definition, a file, an email or a folder can all be regarded as PDIs. What the definition also makes explicit is that PDIs only refer to items that the user has interacted with and that have not automatically been generated by software.

==Notes==
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