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Section: Application Domains

Personal Information Management Systems

We recall that Valda's focus is on human-centric data, i.e., data produced by humans, explicitly or implicitly, or more generally containing information about humans. Quite naturally, we will use as a privileged application area to validate Valda’s results that of personal information management systems (Pims for short) [38].

A Pims is a system that allows a user to integrate her own data, e.g., emails and other kinds of messages, calendar, contacts, web search, social network, travel information, work projects, etc. Such information is commonly spread across different services. The goal is to give back to a user the control on her information, allowing her to formulate queries such as “What kind of interaction did I have recently with Alice B.?”, “Where were my last ten business trips, and who helped me plan them?”. The system has to orchestrate queries to the various services (which means knowing the existence of these services, and how to interact with them), integrate information from them (which means having data models for this information and its representation in the services), e.g., align a GPS location of the user to a business address or place mentioned in an email, or an event in a calendar to some event in a Web search. This information must be accessed intensionally: for instance, costly information extraction tools should only be run on emails which seem relevant, perhaps identified by a less costly cursory analysis (this means, in turn, obtaining a cost model for access to the different services). Impacted people can be found by examining events in the user's calendar and determining who is likely to attend them, perhaps based on email exchanges or former events' participant lists. Of course, uncertainty has to be maintained along the entire process, and provenance information is needed to explain query results to the user (e.g., indicate which meetings and trips are relevant to each person of the output). Knowledge about services, their data models, their costs, need either to be provided by the system designer, or to be automatically learned from interaction with these services, as in [83].

One motivation for that choice is that Pims concentrate many of the problems we intend to investigate: heterogeneity (various sources, each with a different structure), massive distribution (information spread out over the Web, in numerous sources), rapid evolution (new data regularly added), intensionality (knowledge from Wikidata, OpenStreetMap...), confidentiality and security (mostly private data), and uncertainty (very variable quality). Though the data is distributed, its size is relatively modest; other applications may be considered for works focusing on processing data at large scale, which is a potential research direction within Valda, though not our main focus. Another strong motivation for the choice of Pims as application domain is the importance of this application from a societal viewpoint.

A Pims is essentially a system built on top of a user's personal knowledge base; such knowledge bases are reminiscent of those found in the Semantic Web, e.g., linked open data. Some issues, such as ontology alignment [86] exist in both scenarios. However, there are some fundamental differences in building personal knowledge bases vs collecting information from the Semantic Web: first, the scope is quite smaller, as one is only interested in knowledge related to a given individual; second, a small proportion of the data is already present in the form of semantic information, most needs to be extracted and annotated through appropriate wrappers and enrichers; third, though the linked open data is meant to be read-only, the only update possible to a user being adding new triples, a personal knowledge base is very much something that a user needs to be able to edit, and propagating updates from the knowledge base to original data sources is a challenge in itself.