Home // CENTRIC 2011, The Fourth International Conference on Advances in Human-oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services // View article

Personal Information Systems: User Views and Information Categorization

Authors:
Dominique Scapin
Pascal Marie-Dessoude
Marco Winckler
Claudia Detraux

Keywords: personal information items, PIMs, semantic categories, naming, e-gov.

Abstract:
This paper aims to improve Personal Information systems (PIMs) by understanding how people manage personal information items usually kept on notes, cards, agendas, etc., and on administration forms (paper or digital). The focus is both on what people say about information content, organization, trust, willingness to share and on how people categorize information. Preliminary studies (focus group and questionnaire) looked at how people describe their own use of information, and their views on future PIMs needs. They show a strong distrust towards such systems and reluctance to share personal information. Another study (card-sorting) looks at the way people assign individual information items to self-created categories. Results show a few variations in structure and naming, with a gender effect for category size. Detailed clustering and co-occurrence analyses show small differences between how people actually organize their personal information and our initial "theoretical" assignment. While the results suggest some modifications of the information structure and content, it supports the user-centric approach of the study, starting from user needs and associated documents, experimental testing and design iterations, which could be generalized for designing usable PIMs.

Pages: 40 to 47

Copyright: Copyright (c) The Government of France, 2011. Used by permission to IARIA.

Publication date: October 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3492

ISBN: 978-1-61208-167-0

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 23, 2011 to October 29, 2011