Event-based personal retrieval

People who work in a research, academic or business envi ronment often have personal information collections which are large enough to need retrieval aids. A major difference between personal information retrieval and normal docu ment retrieval is that the items to be retrieved are often associated with events in the searcher's life and can be retrieved by their relationship to other events as well as by content. This paper describes some of the background to event-based retrieval and then describes a prototype graph ical event-based retrieval system.