Study and Analysis of User Behaviour and Usage Patterns in a Unified Personal Multimedia Information Envirionment

The ability to capture information using multiple media simultaneously is becoming common due to the development of powerful and easy to use sensor technologies and consumer products. It has therefore been widely postulated that systems that recognize the semantic correlations between heterogeneous media, model them, and allow interactions across them in unified manners are essential for sustaining effective information assimilation in such true multimedia scenarios. In this context, at the state-of-the-art, a key challenge involves studying and analyzing user behaviors and usage patterns in such information management frameworks. In this paper, we address this issue using an event-based unified multimedia information management system. Our research analyzes, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how users organize, manage, query, explore, and assimilate information in such an environment. We also identify certain key features in the unified model, which are found to be of special value in information access and assimilation. Results from our investigation provide important insights into user behavior in pan-media information organization and interaction frameworks and will be valuable in further development of unified modeling, querying, and interaction techniques.