Finding business information by visualizing enterprise document activity

In an enterprise environment, business information, such as project proposals and product discussions, is dynamic and often embedded in documents and document activities (e.g, emails, Web pages and office documents). Because this information is essential to business processes, corporate employees need an effective means to retrieve it. Some commercial products, including Google Desktop, provide keyword searches for finding some of this information. However, this approach is not always effective as successful keyword searches can be difficult to construct, and even the best queries may fail to find some important materials. In this paper, we present Taste (Temporal Activities and Story TElling), an interactive visual analytics system that enhances the enterprise employee's capabilities in searching and sharing diverse and dynamic business information. Taste was designed, after interviews with corporate employees, to follow their information retrieval cues and help them manage, review and share the business information embedded in their document activities. Results of our lab and field studies validate that Taste provides employees the confidence and necessary features to more efficiently and effectively retrieve business information from their documents and activities.