Personal Information Management in Educational Context: the importance of unification to information access

This paper is focused on personal information management system (PIMS) that are aimed at helping students to manage all kind of data they might need during their academic life. Whilst the research on PIMS is not specific to a particular domain, we claim that it is necessary to understand users’ tasks and which data they manipulate in order to design successful tools. As far students are a concern, few works have investigated the challenges that they face for managing personal data in their academic life. In this paper we describe those challenges and we propose centralized approach for managing students build upon the metaphor of a student’s portfolio. The approach relies on standardization of data forms for allowing the communication and data sharing between the portfolio and third-party application. The approach is illustrated by a set of cenarios that demonstrate its feasibility and describe how dedicated PIMS might help students to sort out their duties related to their education