A Case for Usage Tracking to Relate Digital Objects
Venue
ReColl 2008 proceedings (section of IUI 2008 proceedings), ACM
Publication Year
2008
Authors
Elin Rønby Pedersen, Jeanine Spence
BibTeX
Abstract
This paper covers the evolution of the concept of Usage Tracking to automatically
link digital objects such as documents. Extensive ethnographic studies of
information work have revealed that establishing and maintaining relationships –
between documents, between artifacts and between people – is at the core of
information work. Focusing on just one aspect of this challenge, we looked for
practical ways of relating digital documents. Leveraging the fieldwork, we designed
a mechanism captures the user’s activity across documents and reinterprets it as
links between these docu¬ments. We implemented the mechanism as a running prototype
to assess the feasibility of the concept, and in general gauge the opportunities to
make better use of usage data – which are mostly gets ig¬nored in today’s computing
platforms. Object to object relation building through usage data has three
important advantages over most existing methods for automatically establishing
relations: first, it is behaviorist, not relying on guesswork about the user’s
intentions; second, it is media agnostic: text, images and sounds are all just
objects and treated alike; it is the user’s handling of the objects that matter,
and third, it is application agnostic: it does not rely on privileged access to
specific applications.
