Personal Monitoring of Web Information Exchange: Towards Web Lifelogging

With more and more services relying on the Web to communicate with their users, the amount of information exchanged daily by an individual through various Web channels has become difficult to control. Not only have Web 2.0 applications participated to this increase from within the browser, but many other tools now rely on the Web as their basic communication infrastructure, including RSS aggregators, social network apps, update sites, etc. While in principle this gives better possibilities to share and exchange information with various people and organizations, it also makes it more difficult for Web users to fully comprehend, explore and exploit exchanges of their own data. In this paper, we present a set of tools and an experiment on using semantic data management to track and record users’ Web activities, as a way of personal monitoring. More specifically, we describe a tool, a Web lifelogger, dedicated to tracking every exchanges realized over the Web and to store these logs using semantic technologies. We run an experiment on using such a tool for a period of 2.5 months for a particular user, and show how the collected data can be used by the user to monitor and study his own online behavior. We detail in particular the computation of basic analytics (related to the time of Web activities, the locations of the exchanges, etc.), the creation of a model of the perceived trust relationship this user has with different websites (based on the data he exchanged with them) and an investigation on what we can learn about the user from analyzing his use of Web search engines.