Mixing the reactive with the personal: Opportunities for end user programming in personal information management (PIM)

Van Kleek, Max, André, Paul, Moore, Brennan, Karger, David and Schraefel, M. C. (2010) Mixing the reactive with the personal: Opportunities for end user programming in personal information management (PIM). In, No Code Required: Giving Users Tools to Transform the Web. Elsevier, pp. 127-149. (doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-381541-5.00007-9).

Abstract

This chapter presents a personal information assistance engine Atomate, a system to allow end users to utilize Web-based data sources to create reactive automation. The system comprises a uniform internal data model and a constrained-natural language interface to create rules. Through an evaluation, we demonstrated that the majority of participants found it easy to create rules and thought that Atomate would provide value in a number of personal information-related settings. Atomate treats RSS/ATOM feeds from social networking and life-tracking sites as sensor streams, integrating information from such feeds into a simple unified resource description framework (RDF) world model representing people, places, and things and their time-varying states and activities. Combined with other information sources on the Web, including the user's online calendar, Web-based email client, news feeds, and messaging services, Atomate can be made to automatically carry out a variety of simple tasks for the user, ranging from context-aware filtering and messaging to sharing and social coordination actions. Atomate's open architecture and world model easily accommodate new information sources and actions via the addition of feeds and Web services.

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Contributors

Author: M. C. Schraefel

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