Readings' list

Dumais, S., Cutrell, E., Cadiz, J., Jancke, G., Sarin, R., and Robbins, D. C. 2003. Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in informaion Retrieval (Toronto, Canada, July 28 - August 01, 2003). SIGIR '03. ACM Press, New York, NY, 72-79.

Summary/ Key Points

This paper describe the design and evaluation of a system called Stuff I've Seen (SIS).

SIS is a search engine on the personal computer. SIS:

  1. the system provides unified index of information that a person has seen, either in the form of a document, an email, web page, appointment etc.
  2. contextual clues are used in the search interface.

Architecture

The system is build on top of MS Search indexing architecture. It has five component:

  1. Gatherer: interface to different content sources in their native format..
  2. Filter: decodes individual format and emits a character stream
  3. Tokenizer: creates words from the stream.
  4. Indexer
  5. Retriever

Interface

The user interface allows users to specify queries and to view and manipulate results.

Evaluation

They use the log and questionnaires. Using the log they evaluated the type of queries and the date of the docs retrived.

They also evaluated different interfaces: vertical or horizontal layout.

Questionnaires focused on how people organize information before and after SIS and about their experience with SIS.The questionnaire were based on 45 people.

The system is mainly a search engine for a desktop.

Disclaimer: these summaries are made to help me remember the content and the main ideas of the paper. Since I am interested in certain aspects, I may leave out others