Authors:
Prashant Gandhi
and
Roger Tagg
Affiliation:
University of South Australia, Australia
Keyword(s):
Information overload, Personal information management, Task inference, Ontology, Lexicon.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Intelligent Agents
;
Internet Technology
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Today’s knowledge workers are increasingly faced with the problem of information overload as they use current IT systems for performing daily tasks and activities. This paper focuses on one source of overload, namely electronic mail. Email has evolved from being a basic communication tool to a resource used – and misused – for a wide variety of purposes. One possible approach is to wean the user away from the traditional, often cluttered, email inbox, toward an environment where sorted and prioritized lists of tasks are presented. This entails categorizing email messages around personal work topics, whilst also identifying implied tasks in messages that users need to act upon. A prototype email agent, based on the use of a personal ontology and a lexicon, has been developed to test these concepts in practice. During the work, an opportunistic user survey was undertaken to try to better understand the current task management practices of knowledge workers and to aid in the identificat
ion of potential future improvements to our prototype.
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