text: In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
  @cite_30: In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system.
  @cite_4: The increasing mass of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design and implement visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral Calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphics techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Time Lattice is formed by aligning a collection of 2D calendars. 2D translucent shadows provide views and interactive access to the resulting complex 3D object. The paper focuses on how these visualizations were developed. The Spiral Calendar, in particular, has gone through an entire cycle of development, including design, implementation, evaluation, revision and reuse. Our experience should prove useful to others developing user interfaces based on advanced graphics.
  @cite_7: Recent debate has centered on the relative promise of focusinguser-interface research on developing new metaphors and tools thatenhance users abilities to directly manipulate objects versusdirecting effort toward developing interface agents that provideautomation. In this paper, we review principles that show promisefor allowing engineers to enhance human-computer interactionthrough an elegant coupling of automated services with directmanipulation. Key ideas will be highlighted in terms of the Lookoutsystem for scheduling and meeting management.
  @cite_36: Scheduling group meetings requires access to participants' calendars, typically located in scattered pockets or desks. Placing participants' calendars on-line and using a rule-based scheduler to find a time slot would alleviate the problem to some extent, but it often is difficult to trust the results, because correct scheduling rules are elusive, varying with the participants and the agenda of a particular meeting. What's needed is a comprehensive scheduling system that summarizes the available information for quick, flexible, and reliable scheduling. We have developed a prototype of a priority-based, graphical scheduling system called Visual Scheduler (VS). A controlled experiment comparing automatic scheduling with VS to manual scheduling demonstrated the former to be faster and less error prone. A field study conducted over six weeks at the UNC-CH Computer Science Department showed VS to be a generally useful system and provided valuable feedback on ways to enhance the functionality of the system to increase its value as a groupwork tool. In particular, users found priority-based time-slots and access to scheduling decision reasoning advantageous. VS has been in use by more than 75 faculty, staff, and graduate students since Fall 1987.
  @cite_3: Digital devices today have little understanding of their real-world context, and as a result they often make stupid mistakes. To improve this situation we are developing a database of world knowledge called ThoughtTreasure at the same time that we develop intelligent applications. In this paper we present one such application, SensiCal, a calendar with a degree of common sense. We discuss the pieces of common sense important in calendar management and present methods for extracting relevant information from calendar items.
  @cite_11: 
summary: Several interesting design concepts have been suggested to make electronic calendar systems less error-prone and smarter. These cover a wide range, from systems that retrieve tasks from email messages @cite_7 , to systems that learn from users' behavior to recommend intelligent defaults @cite_3 , to calendar systems that predict attendance at events @cite_30 . @cite_36 assessed the effectiveness of a priority-based calendar prototype and concluded that integration with other personal information systems (such as email) would make the system more useful for users. Visualizing calendar information on desktop computers and mobile devices has been explored in several studies @cite_4 @cite_11 .