Watching Through the Web: Building Personal Activity and Context-Aware Interfaces using Web Activity Streams

This paper proposes the use of the increasing numbers of Web- based user activity and personal information sources to enable the creation of more personal, adaptive, and activity-sensitive information tools. We describe our initial steps at investigating this idea, including challenges surrounding integrating information from heterogeneous web data sources. This paper contributes an implementation of an in-browser framework called PRUNE that derives an internal world model consisting of an entity database and event chronology based on heterogeneous RSS/ATOM feeds, Web APIs and other web-based data sources. Finally, we apply this model in an application called Notes that Float, that automatically learns associations between notes and a user's other activities to enable context-aware implicit reminding.