Unified Presentation Of Contextually Connected Information To Improve User Efficiency And Interaction Performance

A unified experience environment supports mechanisms that collect and utilize contextual metadata to associate information in accordance with its relevance to a user's current context. An ambient data collector obtains contextual and activity information coincident with a user's creation, editing or consumption of data and associates it with such data as contextual metadata. A context generator that utilizes contextual metadata to identify relationships between data and enable the proactive presentation of data relevant to a user's current context. Proactive presentation includes a context panel that is alternatively displayable and hideable in an application-independent manner and a unified activity feed that comprises correlated data groupings identified by correlation engines, including a universal, cross-application correlation engine and individual, application-specific correlation engines that exchange information through data correlation interfaces. The context panel and unified activity feed enable users to more efficiently access data and increase their interaction performance with a computing device.