CSR---PDOS: Information Pedigree

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As the scope of available information grows, it is increasinglydifficult to find what one needs when it is needed. The growth ofsearch as an industry is testament to this problem, but existing toolsare incomplete solutions. They index content, but not context. Theycapture only static, syntactic relationships, not dynamic, semanticones. Perhaps most importantly, they have access only to informationstored either on a user's local machine or publicly-accessibledistributed stores---other sources are neither indexed nor searchable.Information Pedigree solves this problem by capturing context andsemantic relationships between information items, collecting disparaterelationship meta-data to support searches, and providing foravailability of relevant items created on machines controlled byindividual users. Information Pedigree achieves this goal byinstrumenting the flow of information between a user's applicationsand services, as well as the flow of information between differentusers. By observing these transactions, we form a contextual andsemantic index over data that is used, simplifying its retrieval forlater use.Information Pedigree will make it easier for people to find and sharedata, without placing additional burdens on them or their IT supportstaff. This greatly reduces time wasted in managing information,allowing information workers to be more productive. The results fromthis project will be widely disseminated in the research literature,and a prototype of the system will be made available to otherresearchers as well as users. This project will train severalgraduate students, and influence the curricula of several graduate andundergraduate courses.