Motivation

The computer today is a central place where we process a lot of our personal information. We use it to communicate, socialize, play, work and learn. The information on the computer is, however, fragmented and scattered across different applications, file formats or even external websites. It is difficult to combine and link different pieces of information together or to get an overview of everything we know about a particular subject. In essence, a unified method for working with personal information available through the computer is needed that will correspond to the individual way each of us organizes information in our minds.

Problem

How to improve personal information management through:

• integration of various sources of information, such as social networks, email, calendars, documents, images, music files, etc.,
• allowing the user to store different kinds of new information,
• combining, linking, assigning meaning, tags or other metadata to information,
• organizing information into meaningful groups,
• presenting information in a way that is useful to the user, and
• sharing information with others.

Approach

An analysis of existing approaches to personal information management, based on selected PIM software, will be performed. A prototype application enabling the user to manage information according to the aforementioned principles will be developed: A functional model involving ways of storing, viewing, interacting with, combining and annotating information will be explored. A data model for the prototype will be described. The first version of the prototype with basic functionality will be finalized and a user interview will be conducted to gather feedback about that prototype. A final prototype will be created based on this feedback.

The whole text of the master thesis can be obtained from here.

Here is a transcript of what is going on in the video:

1. We have received an invitation for a diving event. We create a Note to collect information about this event and then paste the message onto this Note. We mark a relevant fragment of text and annotate it with a to-do task, so possibly we could be reminded about it.
2. We also want to keep track of the people involved in this event. We find our group of diving friends and drag them onto the note. Jon is the organizer. For the others, we make the note a Social event. This results in a new field being added to the Note. We can now drag others there.
3. The To-Do task we have created can be accessed directly from the annotated text fragment. It is also visible in the list of all to-do’s. The to-do also references the annotated text fragment, which allows us to find the Note it was placed on.
4. After the event has taken place, we might want to create a photo album for it. We can drag pictures directly from the browser, and from a disk folder. A unified approach means that the system treats them in the same way.
5. Furthermore, we can associate pictures with people. When dropping a picture onto a person, the application asks for a type of link to create between them.
6. We can now view the details of a picture and we see how those associations are presented.
7. We can also add the photo album to the Note, so it will be easy to find later.
8. Every object can be viewed in many ways. The Note has a default view associated with it, but we can also use a generic view. Here we see all the elements of the Note displayed in another way.
9. Finally, after some time passes, we might want to find this Note again. We didn’t file it in any special way, but we can find it by starting at any object associated with the note that we can think of. For example – a participant of the diving event.

Here are some instructions for running the PIM demo.

Prerequisites

Download the demo package from here.

The PIM system prototype requires the following:

• A working Java JRE environment (at least Java 5)
• .NET framework 3.5 SP1
• .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 (or later)

(Please try running the application first – maybe you have all the prerequisites.)

Setup

The system is composed of two parts – a Java server and a .NET client. The demo is self-contained – it doesn’t install or modify anything outside its directory.

To run the application:

1. Start the Java server – server\start.bat.
2. Run the .NET client – client\PimClient.exe.

Usage

Some basic principles:

• Most elements have context menus. Right-click on different  places to invoke actions on different objects.
  • To invoke an action on the whole object which is opened in a tab, right-click on the tab header.
• Click the “Move to sidebar” button in the top toolbar to move the currently opened tab to the right. This makes it possible to have two objects opened side by side.
• Objects can be dragged from one place to another. For example, to set an object as a value of some property, drop it on the collection associated with that property.
  • Images from disk folders or a web browser can be dragged-and-dropped too. (Note: Metadata is extracted from disk files and this can take some time to process, so the image might not show up immediately.)
  • Objects can be dragged-and-dropped one another – this pops up a box asking for the type of relationship to establish.

Importing data:

• Edit client\PimClient.xml. At the top of the file there is a section for configuring the hostname/username/password for IMAP import and a addressbook path for Thunderbird Addressbook import.
• Start the PimClient. Use the File menu to initiate an import.

Known issues

Changes are saved to the repository once every 30 seconds. This means that:

• Searching for an object might not return a result until it is saved.
• Changes can be explicitly saved by opening the context menu and selecting Commit (this might freeze the application until data is saved).
• When the application is closed, any unsaved changes are lost.

Other problems:

• Sometimes contents of Note objects gets lost.
• Sometimes importing images from disk causes the application to throw an exception. The images are usually imported into the repository but not added to the collection they were drag-n-dropped into. Try searching for type Picture to find those images.

Importing Facebook data

1. Start the server.
2. Go to the Facebook FOAF Generator page:
   http://ext.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u0057/FoafGenerator
3. Download the generated file to disk.
4. The file contains an error which needs to be corrected before importing. Open the file in a text editor and do a search and replace on “#me” to “me” (without the quotes).
5. Open the OpenRDF Workbench:
   http://localhost:8080/openrdf-workbench/
6. Select the “pim” repository.
7. Click Modify -> Add.
8. Select Data format = RDF and click on RDF data file to find the saved file.
9. Click Upload

After importing the data, the list of People in the client should include all the Facebook friends.