A situation-sensitive interface for the management of personal documents

While multimedia/multimodal interfaces allow people to interact with computers more easily, due to an explosion of the information to be managed, an additional facility for assisting people in managing the information is needed. A new approach of personal information management based on the situation is presented. This study was motivated by the fact that (mobile) computers are operated under many different situations, including the time when an event occurs, the location where we are, and actions which were performed in the past. User's actions are dependent on situations. In our trial, information is presented to the user selectively in accordance with the current situation. Here the system monitors user's events and establishes relationships between the information and situations at runtime. A prototype system which has been implemented for demonstrating the effectiveness of the idea in file management, is also explained.