Discovering multitasking behavior at work: A context-based ontology

Abstract

Despite the availability of several task and personal information management tools, an appropriate support to human multitasking at work is still lacking. Supporting multitasking behavior entails capturing and modeling this behavior. In this paper, we refine an approach to model multitasking behavior in organizations, through an ontology based on two interrelated primitives; action and interaction contexts. The main contributions of the proposed ontology are: (1) enable the discovery of scheduling heuristics combining personal and inter-personal elements, (2) enable bottom-up discovery of tasks and (3) suggest a flexible system architecture for multitasking support. The first two contributions are illustrated through a case study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.