Relating Documents via User Activity: The Missing Link

In this paper we describe a system for creating and exposing relationships between documents: a user’s interaction with digital objects (like documents) is interpreted as links – to be discovered and maintained by the system. Such relationships are created automatically, requiring no priming by the user. Using a very simple set of heuristics we demonstrate the uniquely useful relationships that can be established between documents that have been touched by the user. Furthermore, this mechanism for relationship building is media agnostic, thus discovering relationships that would not be found by conventional content based approaches. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation of this basic idea and discuss a couple of natural expansions of the scope of user activity monitoring