1. Trailist Focusing on document activity for assisting navigation Sun Technology Research Excellence Center (SunTREC) Salzburg Research, Austria — 16. August 2001 —
Erich Gams
Sigi Reich
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2. Overview The notion of trails Application of trails
Focusing on document activity
System architecture
Summary & ongoing work
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3. The notion of trails People leave trails by handling information.
Trails constitute a specific path through a set of documents.
perfectly laid out walk ways -> guided tour
“beaten paths” -> trails
Trails are built with information about users’ paths and activities.
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4. The notion of trails
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5. Application of trails Long established concept (see V.Bush)
assisting users in searching and navigating hypertexts
mechanism to find relevant information (documents)
finding users with similar interests
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6. Existing systems
Most existing systems offer some kind of history mode for recently accessed webpages
->not open with respect to other applications than browsers
->only one activity („accessed“) is supported
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7. Activity & trails Activity is an action performed on a document.
Trails have an activity associated with the individual steps - named trailmarks - a user has taken.
Management of trails over time by efficient filtering and retrieval using activities
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8. Openness & trails
Trails can be generated by any application (openness)
client, word processor, ...
Not just Web browsers
Ask questions like:
What documents did I print last week ?
What messages did I post yesterday ?
....
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9. Definition of trails Trails are defined as vectors of trailmarks.
A trailmark is defined as follows:
trailmark = node  activity  date  duration  users‘s identity
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10. Architecture and implementation
SoFAR (Southampton Framework for Agent Research) as implementation platform
Individualizing agents for users
Combining users to groups
Highlevel framework
Ontology for trails defined
Acquisition and Storage Agents as main components
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11. Trailist architecture
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12. Summary
Trails are an established approach to assist users in navigating hypertexts
Activity associated with documents essential for trail-based systems
Lack of openness of existing systems to other applications and their activities
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13. Ongoing Work Development of trail generating agents
(e.g. Print manager, Mail manager)
Development of trail processing agents
Testing and evaluating of „Trailist“ by user groups
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