Using Personal Information Visualization for Document Retrieval

During our constant interaction with computers, we generate large amounts of personal information. However, it is often hard to find a certain item we are looking for, since our data is spread throughout several places and applications. Nevertheless, a meaningful visualization technique may be the solution to this problem. We present VisMe, an interactive integrated visualization system for personal information that allows users to meaningfully navigate and retrieve their data. Relevant concepts (people, subjects and documents) are uniformly displayed in interconnected timelines. Each of these items can be progressively expanded into new timelines, allowing relations between them to be explored in a simple, straightforward way. Several avenues can be simultaneously explored in context, thus giving users insights into their digital selves that current tools have a hard time providing. VisMe goes beyond traditional desktop search solutions by allowing not only keywords, but also the relations between different kinds of personal information to be used to retrieve personally relevant data.