Authors:
Ankit Ahuja
;
Ben Hanrahan
and
Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones
Affiliation:
Virginia Tech, United States
Keyword(s):
Information Fragmentation, Personal Information Management, Tool Integration, Web-based systems.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Data Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Management
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Personalized Web Sites and Services
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Usability and Ergonomics
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
The web browser is a central workspace for knowledge workers, where they use cloud-based applications to
access their information. While this solution fits nicely within our diverse ecosystem of devices, it may reintroduce
and proliferate faults of the desktop, particularly information fragmentation. Information fragmentation
is an increasingly important issue on the cloud as information is typically silo-ed within different applications.
This results in users replicating storage and organization due to the lack of a unifying structure. As cloud
applications become more rich, the need to investigate whether these faults of the past are still problematic
becomes more important. To probe this question we created Contextinator, a tool for the web browser that
assists in coordinating data for projects. Contextinator enables knowledge workers to manage cloud-based information
and project artifacts in a centralized place, providing a unifying structure. In this paper, we discuss
the design
of our system, and the results of our mixed-method evaluation. Our findings contribute insight into
the need for, and appropriateness of, projects as unifying structures for the web. Our results point to two types
of projects we call ‘preparatory’ and ‘opportunistic’ based on when and why users create them.
(More)