figures from the september 10, 1945 Life magazine article “As We may think” by Vannevar Bush.
a great deal of his design can be seen
as an example of what this article will
characterize as a personal knowledge
base.
IMAGES ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIFE MAGAZINE
Personal knowledge bases have existed in some form since humankind
felt compelled to manage information: card files, personal libraries, Da
Vinci’s notebooks. Today there are
literally dozens of software products
attempting to satisfy these needs. Designers approach the problem in different ways, but have the same aim.
And no wonder. If a “memex” was
needed in Bush’s day, then today’s information explosion20 makes it an order of magnitude more important. If a
human’s only tool for retaining what
they learn is their biological memory,
their base of knowledge will be porous indeed.
Yet the problem is deceptively dif-
ficult to solve. How to design a sys-
tem that attempts to capture human
memories? To interrelate heteroge-
neous information, assimilated from
numerous diverse sources and filtered
through an individual’s subjective un-
derstanding? To give users a natural
way to search and correlate and ex-
tend that information? These are mys-
teries that many have attempted to
solve but which remain tantalizingly
incomplete.
the Personal Knowledge Base
We define a Personal Knowledge
Base—or PKB—as an electronic tool
through which an individual can ex-
press, capture, and later retrieve the
personal knowledge he or she has ac-
quired. Our definition has three com-
ponents:
