Fast, flexible filtering with phlat

ABSTRACT

Systems for fast search of personal information are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Such systems promise to dramatically improve personal information management, yet most are modeled on Web search in which users know very little about the content that they are searching. We describe the design and deployment of a system called Phlat that optimizes search for personal information with an intuitive interface that merges search and browsing through a variety of associative and contextual cues. In addition, Phlat supports a unified tagging (labeling) scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems (files, email, etc.). The system has been deployed to hundreds of employees within our organization. We report on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of system use. Phlat is available as a free download at http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/phlat.

References

1. Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M. and Smith, I. (2003). Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool. In Proc. SIGCHI 2003, 5, 1, 345--352.
2. Bush,V. (1945). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176, 101--108.
3. Czerwinski, M., and Horvitz, E. (2002). An investigation of memory for daily computing events. Proc. of HCI 2002, 230--245.
4. Davies, G. and Thomson, D., eds. (1988). Memory in Context: Context in Memory. Wiley: England.
5. Dourish, P., Edwards, W. K., LaMarca, A. and Salisbury, M. (1999). Presto: An experimental architecture for fluid interactive document spaces. ACM Trans on Computer-Human Interaction, 6(2), 133--161.
6. Ducheneaut, N.; Bellotti, V. (2001). Email as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management. ACM Interactions. Sept.-Oct.; 30--38.
7. Dumais, S.T., Cutrell, E., Cadiz, J.J., Jancke, G., Sarin, R. and Robbins, D.C. (2003). Stuff I've Seen: A system for personal information retrieval and re-use. In Proc. SIGIR 2003, 72--79.
8. Fertig, S., Freeman, E. and Gelernter, D. (1996). Lifestreams: An alternative to the desktop metaphor. Proc. SIGCHI 1996, 410--411.
9. Gemmell, J., Bell, G., Lueder, R., Drucker, S. and Wong, C. (2002). MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex vision. Proc. of ACM Multimedia'02, 235--238.
10. Joachims, T., Granka, L., Pang, B., Hembrooke, H. and Gay, G. (2005). Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback. In Proc. SIGIR 2005, 154--161.
11. Jones, W., Bruce, H., Foxley, A., Munat, C.F. (2005). The Universal Labeler: Plan the project and let your information follow, Proc. of ASIST 2005, November.
12. Jones, W. (In Press). Personal information management. Ann. Rev. Info. Science and Tech., in press.
13. Kaptelinin, V. (2003). UMEA: translating interaction histories into project contexts. In Proc. SIGCHI 2003, 5 353--360.
14. Lansdale, M. (1988). The psychology of personal information management. Applied. Ergonomics, 19, 55--66.
15. Mackinlay, J.D., and Zellweger, P.T. (1995). Browsing vs. search: Can we find a synergy? (panel session) In Proc. SIGCHI 1995, 179--180.
16. Malone, T. (1983). How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of office information systems. ACM Trans. Office Info. Sys. 1, 1, 99--112.
17. Plaisant, C, Shneiderman B, Doan, K., and Bruns, T. (1999). Interface and data architecture for query previews in networked information systems. ACM Trans. Info Sys., 17(3):320--341.
18. Quan, D., Bakshi, K., Huynh, D. and Karger, D.R. (2003). User interfaces for supporting multiple categorization. In Interact 2003-9th IFIP TC13 Intl. Conf. on HCI, 228--235.
19. Ringel, M., Cutrell, E., Dumais, S., and Horvitz, E. (2003). Milestones in time: The value of landmarks in retrieving information from personal stores. In Interact 2003-9th IFIP TC13 Intl. Conf. on HCI, 184--191.
20. Rose, D.E., Mander, R., Oren, T., Poncéleon, D.B. Salomon, B. and Won, Y.Y. (1993). Content awareness in a file system interface: implementing the "pile" metaphor for organizing information. In Proc. SIGIR 1993, 260--269.
21. Shneiderman, B., Byrd, D., Croft, B.W. (1998). Sorting out searching: a user-interface framework for text searches. Communications of the ACM, 41(4):95--98.
22. Shneiderman, B. (1994). Dynamic queries for visual information seeking. IEEE Softw. 11, 6, 70--77.
23. Silverstein, C., Henzinger, M., Marais, H. and Moricz, M. (1998). Analysis of a very large AltaVista query log. SRC Technical note #1998-14. On-line at http://gatekeeper. dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/technical-notes/abstracts/src-tn-1998-014.html .
24. Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, B. J., and Saracevic, T. (2001). Searching the Web: The public and their queries. J. Amer. Soc. Info. Science and Tech., 52(3), 226--234.
25. Tulving, E. and Thomson, D. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review 80, 352--373.
26. Venolia, G.D., Dabbish, L., Cadiz, J.J. and Gupta, A. (2001). Supporting email workflow. Microsoft Research Tech. Report MSR-TR-2001-88. On-line at http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2001-88.
27. Windows Desktop Search Extensibility for Partners (Beta). http://addins.msn.com/devguide.aspx
28. Yee, K.P., Swearingen, K., Li, K., and Hearst, M. (2003). Faceted metadata for image search and browsing. Proc. SIGCHI 2003, 401--408.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)