Atomate It! End-user Context-Sensitive Automation using Heterogeneous Information

Sources on the WebMax Van Kleek et el.

MITPresented by

Sangkeun Lee, IDS Lab, SNU

PIMPIM

Personal Information Management

Desktop

PIMPIM

Web

+ wealth of real-time information

= new opportunity

Overview

Atomate:•A next-generation personal information assistance engine•Users can delegate to it simple context & activity reactive tasks and reminders

AtomaAtomatete

RSS/ATOM streams such as,

e-mailonline calendar

news feeds

Integrate into simple unified RDF world model(people, place, things, and their time varying states and activities)

CNLICNLI

a constrained-input natural language

interface for behavior

specification, ...

Atomate:•A next-generation personal information assistance engine•Users can delegate to it simple context & activity reactive tasks and reminders

AtomaAtomatete

RSS/ATOM streams such as,

e-mailonline calendar

news feeds

Integrate into simple unified RDF world model(people, place, things, and their time varying states and activities)

CNLICNLI

a constrained-input natural language

interface for behavior

specification, ...

Overview

• In this paper, the authors shows that RSS feeds can be used as sensor streams to drive adaptive, context reactive automation

• No complex inference, learning, reasoning

• Two key components

1. internal RDF data model that simplifies the integration of heterogeneous information

2. easy interface for end-users to create behaviors and to modify the data model

•Scenario 1: Simple contextual reminding

•Scenario 2: Social coordination

•Scenario 3: Extending the system

Atomate Walk-Through

• Situation- Xaria needs to do certain household chores on particular

days of the week- However, she often forgets to do them since she

sometimes works late- A regular calendar alarm would interrupt while she’s still

at the office or else.

Scenario 1: Simple contextual reminding Extending Atomate

With Atomate, she can set up a reminder action to trigger

precisely when she gets home via a various mechanisms

such as e-mail, SMS, desktop notification

Constraints are evaluated against Atomate’s RDF world model, which is

formed from the integration of various web

data streams about various people, places,

things, and their relationships

• Situation- Ben is often overloaded with things to do and misses

events on his calendar- He sometimes forgets things to do- Or He misses events when he’s busy with other things

- In either case, he wants to be notified which of his friends (if any) attended events he’s scheduled

• Rule- [Notify me] [whenever] [my] [current calendar event’s]

[location] [is not] [my] [location] - [any friend’s] [loation] [is] [my] [current calendar event’s]

[location]- * ‘any’ is a wildcard

Scenario 2: Social coordination

• Situation- Sherry prefers buying groceries from Cropz, a local organic

grocer, but the availability of produce items there changes few every days

- Cropz started posting the arrival of fresh items on a simple static web page

- She sets up an Atomate script to inform her to not buy available organic items whenever she arrives at the supermarket

• How to do?- Her grocer does not pubish an RSS feed, so she uses

DAPPER to construct a mapper to scrape the grocer’s site every couple days

- http://www.dapper.net/open/

Scenario 3: Extending the system

Static WebRSS feed

Rule: Notify me when my location is Cropz and any Fresh

Cropz’s posted date is within the past 24 hours

new RDF classes can be spontaneously created from data arriving from new sources

Atomate

Data Flow

- Retrieving information from the web- Updating its world model- Triggering specified rules

: rules can either cause updates to properties of entities in the world model or trigger a notification

: new actions can be added to call arbitrary web services

Atomate• Atomate’s world model

- represents all data as RDF entities, including information about about things in the physical world (people, places, events), digital items(messages, articles, tweets, and e-mails), as well as Atomate specific rules, predicates, and data sources

- users can redefine or add their own predicates and so on. (via entity Explorer)

• Rules- ‘and’ ‘any’, ‘that’, ‘set’- the rule chainer is a naive forward rule

chainer that uses a brute-force approach

Atomate• User Interface

- “My Stuff”: The Entity Explorer- global address book to reference

information obtained from web sources about people, places, events, articles, and so on.

- Properties can be edited- Redundant items can be merged- ...

- Rule creation and management interface- refer to scenarios

• Adding predicates and actions

- Javascript implementation

• Adding new data sources

- refer to Scenario 3- 1) prepare an RSS/ATOM or public XML feed- 2) Establish a mapping between the new type and an

existing Atomate type- Atomate retrieves and displays a selection of raw items

from the new sources- the user selects the Atomate type that best matches

the type of the entities retrieved from the new source- Atomate automatically maps properties in the

destination type that match source type property exactly

- Users can manually match remaining properties

Extending Atomate

•Extending Atomate’s schemas

•Automatically updated properties

- [whenever][any GPS Observation’s][user id] is [any Person’s][gps service username], set [that Person]’s [current location] to [that GPS Observation’s][location]

Extending Atomate

Evaluation

Evaluation

•Extending the rule language• “within N minutes of” “while”, ...

•Simulation and by-demonstration UI

•Sharing behaviors and activity feeds

•From pull to push: PubSubHubbub

Ongoing Work

•RSS feed as datasource for Context-aware Service

•LifeLogOn vs. Atomate

•CNLI for Korean Language?

Discussion and Conclusion