Relating Documents via User Activity: The Missing Link, IUI '08

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1380000/1378837/p389-pedersen.pdf?key1=1378837&key2=3852731721&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=81639924&CFTOKEN=12013848

Comments:
Aaron Loveall

Summary:
The researchers created a desktop sidebar tool that they called Ivan.  The goal of Ivan was to help a user better access documents and files that were related to the one they were currently viewing.  Living on a desktop sidebar Ivan monitors which windows are open at the current time and will display suggested documents that might be similar or somehow associated.

The idea is that many users often have trouble figuring out the proper location to put a file in and many times, when they hastily stow it away somewhere, they have trouble relocating the file.  With Ivan this becomes irrelevant because the system should know that when a user opens a certain file they might also want another one and suggest these elusive files to the user.

Ivan operates by spying on the interactions between the file system and the individual open windows.  This data allows Ivan to compile a list of related views for future display.  Ivan doesn't know about anything that is going on inside the windows however.

Conclusion:
Personally I don't feel that I would get a tremendous amount of use from Ivan.  I, and I would assume most other Computer Scientists, take great pains to keep out file systems very neatly organized.  For many of our less technical peers however, Ivan could be of great assistance.  I see it being the most useful in a business setting where for example you are on the phone speaking about a specific topic and need to open a document on the topic quickly.  If you have something else about that topic open Ivan should already have the information in front of you.

This would be a good feature to include with an operating system.  It would integrate well and be a nice selling point feature.  I would encourage the researchers to see if Microsoft would want to include this in Windows 8.