Lifestreams: Organizing your Electronic Life*

Abstract

The "Web," an attempt to organize the electronic world, has become the focus of a wide range of research activities from agents to information retrieval to virtual reality systems, and is a central focus of work presented at this symposium. Our work considers a more humble task: that of organizing our own electronic lives. We introduce a new metaphor, Lifestreams, for dynamically organizing a user's personal files, electronic mail, schedules, rolodex and financial data. In this paper we describe our prototype Lifestreams system and in the process cover most of the topics of this symposium, including indexing, information retrieval, user interfaces, multisource integration and multimedia.