[ba-ohs-talk] KnownSpace -- information management
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~rawlins/website/entry.html
This is the entry page to the website of Gregory Rawlins, who conducted a
course on personal data management which led to the creation of the web
site http://www.knownspace.org
The project has involved 70+ students over 3 years. (01)
Rawlins' web site contains all the background, history, theory, and so forth. (02)
Here's a quote from the entry:
"The web is growing exponentially. Search engine queries now often return
millions of irrelevant pages. Those pages are not spatially arranged,
clustered by topic, or distinguished in any way other than by their titles,
so we have no idea of the relevance of any page before reading it. The same
is true for mail and news. After we save webpages, mail messages, news
articles, ftp pages, or any pages produced with an editor or any other
application, those pages become lost on our desktops. They are not analyzed
in any way, clustered according to our interests, or laid out spatially to
show their similarities to other pages already there. Even after we
organize the pages on our desktops by hand there is no automation to help
us reoganize them, search them, navigate through them, or find more pages
like them. Our computers don't help us manage our own data. This website
describes a smart, visual, autonomous information manager that adaptively
deduces its user's interests, analyzes its pages, displays them spatially,
and automatically searches for new, relevant pages. All pages, whether from
the web, mail, news, ftp, an editor, or any other program, are visually
distinguished to show their relevance to topics likely to interest the user" (03)
Work on the project seems to have stopped sometime last year, though that
may just reflect the fact that newer work has not been posted. The running
version I have does not appear to be complete yet. Licensed with the
Apache license, and Java, the code might make a useful starting point. The
system architecture calls for tiny programs called "simpletons", each of
which do something useful, like collect email, cluster information, and so
forth. (04)