A Study On Integrated Personal Information Management Tools

Nowadays, especially the mobile internet era, the release of information is no longer from center to the surrounding. Everyone in a society can be a publisher of information or disseminators. It is difficult that human remain as processing "machine" to control all the information. From the information-aid law, personal information processing capacity is less than the individual’s information processing requirements, the human is looking for tools, equipments or machines and other outside forces to assist human to manage information, so personal information management (PIM) and PIM tools appear logically.From the literature research of the foreign PIM, the study of the PIM can be broadly classified into three categories. First, the main body is human beings, who live, work and learning activities related to PIM behavior, practices, needs and applications. Second, the object of PIM, such as documents, e-mails, bookmarks, records, calendar and other PIM, with the development of electronic technology, more and more PIM object is primarily concerned with electronic personal information, such as electronic documents, digital photos and videos. Finally, the third branch of the personal information management is the personal information management activities. PIM is how to carry out, such as discovery, acquisition, storage, search and meta-level of PIM activities. These activities should be implemented through specific practices or tools. PIM activities carried out between the subject and object, a variety of PIM needs are the driving force for development of PIM tools.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter section discusses the background purpose and significance of the PIM development.The second chapter is literature review. As a branch of the information management, PIM is still a young topic. Therefore, different scholars must face the basic problem, such as the concept of PIM Category (divided into function, time, system), followed by how to understand the PIM, the difference between "information of personal" and "personal information", the range of PIM object, PIM activities and meta-level activitiesFrom two aspects discusses PIM tools and tool prototype, one is oriented visualization prototype, such as e-mail:linear visualization, time multi-dimensional visualization, web-oriented visualization, document visualization. In addition, there are semantic-oriented and task-oriented prototype visualization tools.Secondly, it discusses from integration-oriented (for the physical attributes and virtual properties) and the integration of PIM-oriented activities (for re-search, re-use integration and for the meta-level activities).The third chapter discusses the demand of integration-oriented PIM tools (see Table1) through questionnaires,"personal information paradox" and the detailed analysis of user’s actual potential needs.The fourth chapter is from the view of integration-oriented point to analyze the willingness of users to use PIM tools. It builds a hypothetical model, sets the assumptions and path relations. Through questionnaire design, distribution and collection of.csv format data. Using SmartPLS test the path validation, efficacy and willingness.The fifth chapter is the section of conclusion and outlook. Proposing future goal is to build "Personal Information Map" and "Personal Knowledge Map."This thesis describes the background and progress of the foreign personal information management development, analyzes the development of prototypes, such as from a visual point, the perspective of integration. Through empirical analysis and SmartPLS verified a positive effect on relations between the factors. It presents some advices on the development of personal information management tools especially integration-oriented.