Operation record based workflow extracting method for personal information management system

In businesses, knowledge of work is represented by a sequence of related work events and management of these relations is very important for users. The paper proposes a method that automatically groups related work events from a user´s operation record on a Personal Information Management system (PIM). We assume that the related work events on a PIM are operated consecutively by a user. Our method accumulates the target event and time of the user´s operations such as inputs, changes, and references, and picks out all related events based on their recorded operation time. However, reference to events is an act that a user just looks at an event on a calendar view, not involving any operation, so recording which event and what time the user referred to is difficult. In order to record the user´s reference behavior exactly, we introduce a balloon help based function for event reference support. We ran a one month trial of our developing prototype and confirmed our method can group related work events with acceptable accuracy