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. This paper proposes a method that automatically groups related work events from 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 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.