Keywords
information management, personal information management, pim, hypertext, wiki, personalization, information organization, blogging, computer-supported cooperative work
Cite As
K. Andrew Edmonds, James Blustein and Don Turnbull (2006). A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator. Journal of Digital Information, 5(1).
Abstract
The Next Big Thing is being grown organically, cultivated by software developers and pruned by personal Weblog publishers. The rising Weblogging space of the Internet is looking more like traditional hypertext than the Web of the 1990s. The ways in which Weblogging has evolved beyond the previous limitations of the Web as hypertext, and the ways Weblogging is evolving towards common-use hypertext destined to play a critical role in everyday life, will be explored. We have a vision of a universal information management system built on extending the traditional hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today’s blogs to structure, search and share personal information, as well as to participate in shared discussion. We begin by expressing a vision of common-use hypertext for information management and interpersonal communication.
This vision is grounded in the rapid evolution of Weblogs and known issues in information systems and hypertext. The practical implications of who will use these systems, and how, is expanded as usage scenarios for Weblogs now and in the future. After recapping the current issues facing the Weblogging community, we look to the long-range implementation issues with optimism. Our system is forward-looking yet realistic. The activities the system will support are extrapolated from recent developments in the online community, and most of the sketches of implementation are based on current approaches. It is of more than passing interest that the features we extrapolate were all described by Nelson as early hypertext ideals. Of particular interest is that the features are now being implemented because of perceived immediate need by communities of interest.
Excerpt
Looking Ahead
An enriched personal history of interaction with any networked information, organized by time, location or activity will add much-needed context to ubiquitous computing and its potential for always-on history collection. This history will be available in the universal information manager for user controlled contributions to a spectrum of distributed access, from private to public and dynamic to archival. Already the practice of moblogging (i.e. the use of digital camera-equipped cell phones to take and share photographs taken anywhere [8]) is expanding the abilities of personal information collections. Moreover, this expansion of digital information collection leads to a multimedia-rich world of individual history, shareable with family, friends and others as permitted. Flexible recombinations of media will allow the easy assemblage of interlinked hypermedia scrapbooks in the PIKII: to catalog the interactions of subsets of people, places and activities enabled by automatically created metadata at the time of media creation, through subsequent interaction and by explicit tagging.Systems that generate and use implicit tagging and information classification are also key elements of the PIKII. Just as Google uses popularity and relevance measures to sort and rank Web information, authoring tools will enable the use of information annotation in appropriate metadata dimensions to add information about a link or node of information. Such link type information might be, at its simplest, an affective score or a value along a more sophisticated dimension such as typing the rhetorical relationship. This information, when combined with personal history, information content, the interaction with a peer’s data (expressed in any number of ways from a blog post, shared access to personal information or popularity measures), will be key factors that help make information searching more personally relevant.
Beyond singular units of information, the PIKII will provide interfaces for mapping discussions distributed across the Internet and could be the catalyst for widescale adoption of link types in more traditional discussion systems. Affective components of link types may dominate the social aspects of Weblog communication due to simplicity in authoring and dynamic typing through the explicit and implicit methods previously noted. While transclusion and annotation have formed the basis for widespread adoption of hypertext for Weblog communication, the proposed link and node type additions, as well as more general metadata improvements, will facilitate the intertwingling of information, but with an intelligence to help manage attention and provenanceIn many ways, this article aligns with a subset of the goals of the semantic Web space (Berners-Lee et al. 2001), which also promises utility for metadata-enriched information about everyday events. In an ideal world, service providers and vendors, software tools and agencies would offer information in standardized, metadata-enriched, machine readable formats suitable for semantic Web intentions. Many chores might be automated, as in the arrangement of health care for example.
Expanding from the semantic Web, a system of successful micropayment schemes may arise, whether they be karmic and barter schemes or involve actual funds transfer that may drive the received value of both preparing and accessing this semantically-enriched information. Information exchanges with knowledgeable experts and the distribution of favors through a Friend-of-a-Friend network may prove to be more valuable and more popular than micropayments. As we have seen, a key to the widespread adoption of Web information to date is the ability to connect openly with individuals and groups who share common interests, a trend that should continue.This combination of personal, aggregate and networked contextualizing of information nodes and their linking methods has wide-ranging potential for many dimensions of personal knowledge management efforts. The critical need for personal information management and publishing is to bring the fluency that Weblogging software has created for publishing to the process of connecting and integrating information, leading to a storehouse of personal knowledge.
Conclusion
We have a vision of a universal information management system built on a hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today’s blogs to structure, search and share personal information as well as to participate in shared discussion. Just as Nelson (1990) envisioned a network where everything is deeply intertwingled, we propose that not only everything, but everyone can belong to several, possibly overlapping and discordant, intertwingled communities of interest. These communities will form dense networks of information linkage, allowing many types of structured and unstructured content to continually expand and weave even more interconnected webs of relationships.
People are motivated to communicate many aspects of their lives to many different audiences. The rapid growth of Weblogging has affirmed the appeal of hypertext and validated the notion of individuals as content producers. The availability of personal hypertext systems, with support for granular control over sharing nodes, will increase this adoption for both Weblog authors and readers.
The growth in the amount of digitally captured and hypertextualized information in the coming years will be even more astounding than the growth of the Web over the past ten years. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, but the standards-based organic growth of Weblogs and the Internet shows methods by which these challenges might be overcome. Rejecting the Web as not-hypertext is missing the point. The Web is an incubator for a continuously evolving system of content, user interests and supporting technologies.
References in this publication
- Allen, T. J. (1977) “Information needs and uses”. In Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 4, pp. 3 – 29
- Anderson, Corin R. and Horvitz, Eric (2002) “Web Montage: A Dynamic Personalized Start Page”. Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference, Honolulu, HI, May http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/468/
- Berners-Lee, Tim, Hendler, James and Lassila, Ora (2001) “The Semantic Web”. Scientific American, 284(5):34 – 43, May http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&catID=2
- Berners-Lee, Tim (1999) Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (HarperCollins)
- Bernstein, Mark (2003) IPodlings, 18 November http://markbernstein.org/Nov0301.html#note_35207
- Blustein, James and Staveley, Mark (2001) “Methods of Generating and Evaluating Hypertext”. In Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 35, chapter 6, edited by Martha E. Williams (American Society for Information Science and Technology)
- Brin, S. and Page, L. (1998) “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine”. Proceedings of the 7th International WWW Conference, pp. 107 – 117 http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm
- Brockman, Katherine (2003) “America Online Members Capture The Spirit of America – In Pictures”. AOL/TimeWarner press announcement, 1 July http://media.aoltimewarner.com/media/press_view.cfm?release_num=55253250
- Bush, Vannevar (1945) “As We May Think”. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1):101-108, July http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
- Chi, Ed H., Pirolli, Peter and Pitkow, James (2000) “The scent of a site: a system for analyzing and predicting information scent, usage, and usability of a Web site”. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, The Hague, The Netherlands, pp. 161 – 168 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/chi00scent.html
- Claypool, Mark, Brown, David, Le, Phong and Waseda, Makoto (2001) “Inferring User Interest”. IEEE Internet Computing, November/December http://www.cs.wpi.edu/%7Eclaypool/papers/iui/
- Conklin, Jeff and Begeman, M. L. (1998) “gIBIS: A hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion”. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6(4):303-331, October
- Decrem, Bart (2003) “Mozilla.org Announces Launch of the Mozilla Foundation to Lead Open-Source Browser Efforts”. Mozilla.org, 15 July http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-foundation.html
- Engelbart, Douglas C. (1962) “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA, October http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/augmentinghumanintellect/ahi62index.html
- Franzen, Kristofer and Karlgren, Jussi (2000) “Verbosity and Interface Design” SICS Technical Report T2000:04 (presented at AAAI Spring Symposium 1997) http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/313985.html
- Furner, Jonathan, Ellis, David and Willett, Peter (1999) “Inter-linker consistency in the manual construction of hypertext documents”. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(4es) http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/jfurner/csurv00.pdf
- Gilmore, Dan (2003) “Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time”. SiliconValley.com, February 15 http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml
- Good, Nathaniel, Shafer, Ben, Konstan, Joe, Borchers, A., Sarwar, B., Herlocker, Jon and Riedl, John (1999) “Combining Collaborative Filtering with Personal Agents for Better Recommendations”. In Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence ( AAAI-99), pp. 439-446 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/good99combining.html
- Grossman, Wendy (1987) net.wars (NYU Press)
- Kleinberg, J. (1998) “Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment”. Proceedings of the Ninth ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. Also appears as IBM Research Report RJ 10076, May 1997 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/87928.html
- Kuhlman, Ashby (2002) When is a link an endorsement? September 6 http://www.ashbykuhlman.net/blog/2002/09/06/0546
- Losee, Robert M. and Paris, Lee Anne H. (1999) “Measuring Search-Engine Quality and Query Difficulty: Ranking with Target and Freestyle”. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 50(10):882-889 http://www.ils.unc.edu/%7Elosee/par/paril.html
- Nelson, Theodor Holm (1990) Literary Machines, edition 90.1 (The Distributors, 702 South Michigan, South Bend, IN 46601-3122)
- Nielsen, Jakob (2001) “Search: Visible and Simple”. Alertbox, 13 May 2001 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010513.html
- Pausch, R. and Detmer, J. (1990) “Node Popularity as a Hypertext Browsing Aid”. Electronic Publishing: Origination, Dissemination and Design, 3(4):227 – 234, November http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume3/issue4/ep035rp.pdf
- Phelps, Thomas A. and Wilensky, R. (2001) “The Multivalent Browser: A Platform for New Ideas”. Proceedings of Document Engineering, Atlanta, GA, November
- Pitkow, James, Schütze, Hinrich, Cass, Todd, Cooley, Rob, Turnbull, Don, Edmonds, Andy, Adar, Eytan and Breuel, Thomas (2002) “Personalized Search”. Communications of the ACM, 45(9), September
- Pratik, Dave, Karadkar, Unmil P., Furuta, Richard, Francisco-Revilla, Luis, Shipman, Frank and Dash, Suvendu (2003) “Navigation, Path-centric browsing, Navigation metaphors, Directed paths, Walden’s Paths, Path Engine”. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Nottingham, UK, August
- Pu, Hsiao-Tieh, Chuang, Shui-Lung and Yang, Chyan (2002) “Subject Categorization of Query Terms for Exploring Web Users’ Search Interests”. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(8):617-630
- Rheingold, Howard (2002) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, revised edition (MIT Press) http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/
- schraefel, m.c. and Zhu, Yuxiang (2001) “Interaction Design for Web-Based, Within-Page Collection Marking and Management”. In Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Arhus, Denmark, August
- Selfe, Cynthia and Boese, Christine (2003) The Clemson Laptop Program: Insiders’ Perspectives http://www.nutball.com/laptopresearch/
- Sullivan, Danny (2003a) “Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings”. Search Engine Watch, 23 February http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451
- Sullivan, Danny (2003b) “comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings”. Search Engine Watch, 16 August http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156431
- Tague-Sutcliffe, Jean (1995) Measuring Information: An Information Services Perspective (Academic Press)
- Tauscher, Linda and Greenberg, Saul (1997) “How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems”. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 47(1):97-138 http://ijhcs.open.ac.uk/tauscher/tauscher-01.html
- Trigg, Randall H. and Weisner, Mark (1986) “TEXTNET: A network-based approach to text handling”. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 4(1):1-23, January
- Trott, Mena and Trott, Ben (2002) Feature: TrackBack, 10 June http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/archives/2002_06.html
- Walker, Jill (2002) “Links and power: the political economy of linking on the Web”. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (ACM Press), pp. 72 – 73
- Walker, Jill (2003) “Definition of weblog”. To appear in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 28 June 2003 version http://huminf.uib.no/%7Ejill/archives/blog_theorising/final_version_of_weblog_definition.html
- Wexelblat, Alan and Maes, Pattie (1997) “Using History to Assist Information Browsing”. In RIAO’97: Computer-Assisted Information Retrieval on the Internet, Montreal
- Winer, Dave (2003) RSS 2.0 Specification http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss