Evaluating Tools of the X-COSIM Semantic Desktop
Presentation by Thomas Franz at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: FGWM
Hypothesis: PIM benefits from information linkage and information reuse across PIM application.
Method: Using RDF and Semantic Web technologies.
X-COSIM provides the X-COSIMO ontology:
Among others, X-COSIMO defines contextual information in a formal representation for context, the contextual ontology includes concepts such as email, attachment, sender, recipients. Attachments e.g. contextualizes information object, while sender and recipient contextualizes agents in the systems.
Evaluation:
Does an X-COSIM enabled desktop provide better support for PIM tasks than a conventional one?
Better means: increased effectiveness (absolute time spend on each task), increased efficiency (goals reached: distance of mouse movements, number of window switches, …), increased satisfaction (questionnaire, ratings, interview).
- 18 participants: 3 graduate students and 15 Ph.D.s students; none of them used the semantic desktop before.
- Introduction (to the scenario, to the dataset, get acquainted to the system), observation, and feedback phase.
- Scenario: Real data select from the organizers of the Night of Computer Science in Koblenz (more than 140 emails, 44 files, 40 files via eMail, …)
- Tasks: (1) organization tasks (familiarization: all emails in one folder and participants had to create a folder structure), (2) lookup tasks (baseline: re-finding information; baseline as this feature was not expected to be of greater benefit in contrast to others), (3) multi-item tasks (evaluation), (4) document-driven collaboration (evaluation), (5) information collation (evaluation)
- Evaluation Wizard: guiding the user through the evaluation; presenting the lookup tasks, …, and questionnaire. The wizard tracked the execution time for each task.
Results: Semantic desktop can improve PIM.
Implementation: Runs on KDE with Thunderbird. download now