Tag-Based Metonymic Search in an Activity-Centric Aggregation Service

Knowledge workers often need to find, organize, and work with heterogeneous resources from diverse services, information stores, and repositories. This paper analyzes two problems that knowledge workers frequently encounter: difficulty in finding all relevant resources across diverse services, and difficulty in formulating and executing searches for resources related to their current activity-of-interest. The Malibu project explores solutions to these problems through a dynamic peripheral display that aggregates knowledge resources from multiple services to support activity-centric work. Of particular interest is the ability to select a knowledge resource and use it as a metonym (a proxy) for its social-tagging metadata in a tag-based search for related resources among heterogeneous services. We evaluated our solutions to these two problems through convergent analyses of quantitative (data log) and qualitative (interview and discussion data) data. Our partial successes show the strength of these new ideas, and indicate areas for future research.