This paper describes pilot work in which we explore the feasibility of deriving a goal framework for the potential users of applications employing a grounded theory method based on a corpus of empirical data. The issue of developing and applying human goal frameworks has been studied in a number of areas, such as artificial intelligence and information seeking. But most existing goal frameworks are either constrained to a few information search related goals or mainly reflect highly abstract psychological motivations, and hence are not readily applicable to the applications which need to deal with complex practical users’ goals. In this study, we employ corpus-based approach for goal framework development, and identify goal concepts and analyse semantic relations among them based on a collection of interview and diary transcripts. We suggest that our approach provides a feasible way of deriving goal frameworks for practical purposes as the corpus data tend to closely reflect the users’ concrete requirements. Furthermore, our study reveals the need for more corpus resources for human goal analysis and automatic detection.