The Goal Behind the Action: Toward Goal-Aware Systems and Applications

Human activity is almost always intentional, be it in a physical context or as part of an interaction with a computer system. By understanding why user-generated events are happening and what purposes they serve, a system can offer a significantly improved and more engaging experience. However, goal...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACM transactions on database systems 2016-12, Vol.41 (4), p.1-43
Main Authors: Papadimitriou, Dimitra, Koutrika, Georgia, Mylopoulos, John, Velegrakis, Yannis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Data management
Data processing
Management
Multidisciplinary
Systems analysis
Tasks
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Human activity is almost always intentional, be it in a physical context or as part of an interaction with a computer system. By understanding why user-generated events are happening and what purposes they serve, a system can offer a significantly improved and more engaging experience. However, goals cannot be easily captured. Analyzing user actions such as clicks and purchases can reveal patterns and behaviors, but understanding the goals behind these actions is a different and challenging issue. Our work presents a unified, multidisciplinary viewpoint for goal management that covers many different cases where goals can be used and techniques with which they can be exploited. Our purpose is to provide a common reference point to the concepts and challenging tasks that need to be formally defined when someone wants to approach a data analysis problem from a goal-oriented point of view. This work also serves as a springboard to discuss several open challenges and opportunities for goal-oriented approaches in data management, analysis, and sharing systems and applications.
ISSN:0362-5915
1557-4644
DOI:10.1145/2934666