Automatically finding contextually related items of a task

Abstract

Architecture for enabling a user to automatically recover documents and other information associated with work contexts and recover documents and other information artifacts associated with a specific project. The architecture enables monitoring and recording of activity information related to user interactions with information artifacts pertaining to a particular work context. The user can select a document having a portion of work content (e.g., a term or other type of reference item in a document) related to the work context. A lexical analysis is performed on the activity information and the reference item to identify lexical similarities. A list of candidate items (e.g., related documents) is inferred from the information artifacts based on the lexical similarities. The candidate items related to the work context are presented to the user, who can select specific items to reestablish the work context.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A computer-implemented contextual system, comprising:
 an activity component for monitoring and recording activity information related to user interaction with information artifacts in a work context;   a reference artifact comprising at least one reference item related to the work context;   an analysis component for performing lexical analysis on the activity information and the reference item to identify lexical similarities;   an inference component that infers candidate items selected from the information artifacts based on the lexical similarities; and   a presentation component for presenting the candidate items related to the work context.   
     
     
         2 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the work context further comprises at least one of document content, communications related to the document content, location of the document content, or user environment relating to the document content. 
     
     
         3 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the information artifacts comprise at least one type of user recognizable and usable data entity. 
     
     
         4 . The system of  claim 3 , wherein the data entity further comprises at least one of a file, a data stream, a web page, a spreadsheet, an email, a calendar appointment, an instant messaging conversation, a sticky note, or embedded metadata. 
     
     
         5 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the presentation component further comprises a score assignment for hierarchically ranking the candidate items. 
     
     
         6 . The system of  claim 1 , further comprising a weighting component for assigning a weighting factor to relevance of at least one predetermined activity information item. 
     
     
         7 . The system of  claim 1 , further comprising an actuable menu element for manually displaying the candidate items in a user interface. 
     
     
         8 . A computer-implemented contextual method, comprising:
 monitoring and recording activity information related to user interaction with information artifacts in a work context;   performing lexical analysis on the activity information and a reference item related to the work context to identify lexical similarities;   inferring candidate items selected from the information artifacts based on the lexical similarities between the activity information and the reference item resulting from the analysis; and   presenting the candidate items related to the work context.   
     
     
         9 . The method of  claim 8 , further comprising reconstituting the work context by processing the candidate items. 
     
     
         10 . The method of  claim 8 , further comprising inferring respective associated candidate items from a selected candidate item to obtain a more precise set of candidate items. 
     
     
         11 . The method of  claim 8 , further comprising hierarchically ranking the candidate items in accordance with frequency of lexical similarities between the activity information and the reference item. 
     
     
         12 . The method of  claim 8 , further comprising hierarchically ranking the candidate items in accordance with frequency of switches between the information artifacts and a reference document containing the reference item. 
     
     
         13 . The method of  claim 8 , further comprising automatically monitoring the user interaction as a background process.