A conceptual framework for an interactive personal information management system

The growth of digital cameras has resulted in the creation of huge collections of personal photographs and video. Thus, in the last few years personal information management (PIM) has become an important topic in the information retrieval area, in which it is playing an interest role in managing and retrieving personal collections. Therefore, many previous studies have tried to visualize these collections in different ways. This paper aims to discuss the importance of visualization techniques that have been proposed in the PIM field in general, and it shows the main factors that have influence on visualizing an interactive PIM system interface for large collections of photographs and video in particular. The factors were identified through reviews of related work. The collated factors form a conceptual framework of interactive PIM system interfaces for photograph and video collections. The aim of the framework is to ensure full understanding about the personal information lifecycle and thus leads to the production of a PIM system that satisfies its intended users.