Task-centred information management

TLDR: The first main contribution of this paper is the investigation of task inference theoretical issues, and it is shown how the use of the Personal Ontology helps for computing simple task inference.

Abstract: The goal of DELOS Task 4.8 Task-centered Information Management is to provide the user with a Task-centered Information Management system (TIM), which automates user's most frequent activities, by exploiting the collection of personal documents. In previous work we have explored the issue of managing personal data by enriching them with semantics according to a Personal Ontology, i.e. a user-tailored description of her domain of interest. Moreover, we have proposed a task specification language and a top-down approach to task inference, where the user specifies main aspects of the tasks using forms of declarative scripting. Recently, we have addressed new challenging issues related to TIM user's task inference. More precisely, the first main contribution of this paper is the investigation of task inference theoretical issues. In particular, we show how the use of the Personal Ontology helps for computing simple task inference. The second contribution is an architecture for the system that implements simple task inference. In the current phase we are implementing a prototype for TIM whose architecture is the one presented in this paper.