Communications - February 2011

from diverse sources, synthesized into a mental framework that allows us to make sense of it. As the user is materializing their framework explicitly in a PKB tool, it should be easy to grab the short excerpts that they find relevant and import them into the knowledge base in a painless way. This is equivalent to the simpler form of transclusion, as defined previously.

˲ ˲ Standardization between PKB vendors needs to take place so that a user’s knowledge is not inextricably bound to a particular tool. A PKB should conform to these standards through some kind of import/export facility.

˲ ˲ Finally, researchers should take a good look at the tools that have been adopted on a wide scale—blogs or wikis, for instance. Though heavily based on free text rather than richly interconnected knowledge elements, one of their functions can be seen as makeshift knowledge management. Perhaps the best route to a successful PKB would be to take advantage of the broad adoption of such tools and enhance them with the capability of expressing knowledge in a more structured form.

To pull all these ideas together,
imagine a distributed system that se-
curely stores your personal knowledge
and is available to you anywhere, any-
time: from any computer, or from a
handheld device that you always carry
with you. Furthermore, the knowl-
edge it contains is in a flexible form
that can readily accommodate your
very thoughts. It contains all the con-
cepts you have perceived in the past
and want to recall—historical events,
business plans, phone numbers, sci-
entific formulas—and does not en-
courage you to isolate them from one
another, or to prematurely commit to
a structure that you might find restric-
tive later. The concepts can be linked
together as in a graph, clustered visu-
ally on canvases, classified in multiple
categories, and/or arranged hierar-
chically, all for different purposes. As
further information is encountered—
from reading documents, brainstorm-
ing project plans, or just experiencing
life—it is easy to assimilate into the
tool, either by capturing snippets of
text and relating it to what is already
known, or by creating new concepts
and combining them with the easily
retrievable old. External documents
can be linked into the knowledge
structure in key places, so that they
can be classified and easily retrieved.
It is effortless to augment the content
with annotations, and to rearrange it
to reflect new understandings. And
this gold mine of knowledge is always
exportable in a form that is compatible
with other, similar systems that have
different features and price points.

References

1. Adar, E., Karger, D. and Stein, L. A. Haystack: Per-user information environments. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Knowledge Management, (Kansas City, MO, 1999), 413–422.

2. Amer-Yahia, S., Botev, C., Dörre, J., and Shanmugasundaram, J. XQuery full-text extensions explained. IBM Systems Journal 45 (2006), 335–351.

3. Anderson, J.R. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 3rd Ed. W.H. Freeman, NY, 1990.

4. Bernstein, M., Collages, Composites, Construction. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, (Nottingham, U. K., 2003).

5. Bhagwat, D., Chiticariu, L., Tan, W. C. and Vijayvargiya, G. An annotation management system for relational databases. The Intern. J. Very Large Data Bases 14 (2005), 373–396.

6. Broekstra, J., Kampman, A. and Van Harmelen, F. Sesame: A generic architecture for storing and querying rdf and rdf schema. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (2002), 54–68.

7. Buneman, P., Fernandez, M., and Suciu, D. UnQL: A query language and algebra for semistructured data based on structural recursion. The VLDB Journal 9 (2000), 76–110.

8. Buneman, P., Chapman, A., and Cheney, J. Provenance management in curated databases. In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. ACM, N Y, 539–550.

9. Bush, V. As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly 176, 1 (July 1945), 101–108.

10. Canas, A.J., Hill, G., Carff, R., Suri, N., Lott, J., Gomez, G., Eskridge, T. C., Arroyo, M. and Carvajal, R. Cmap Tools: A knowledge modeling and sharing environment. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Concept Mapping, (Pamplona, Spain, 2005), 125–133.

11. Conklin, J. Hypertext: An introduction and survey. Computer 20, 9 (Sept. 1987), 17–41.

12. Conklin, J. and Begeman, M.L. gIBIS: A hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work, (Portland, OR), 140–152.

13. Davies, S., Allen, S., Raphaelson, J., Meng, E. Engleman, J., King, R., and Lewis, C. Popcorn: The Personal Knowledge Base. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (2006), 150–159.

14. Dittrich, J.P. and Salles, M. A. V. iDM: A unified and versatile data model for personal dataspace management. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (2006), 367–378.

15. Engelbart, D.C. A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect. P. W. Howerton, ed. Vistas in Information Handling. Spartan Books, Washington, D. C., 1963, 1–29.

16. Fernandez, M., Florescu, D., Levy, A. and Suciu, D. A query language for a web-site management system.

ACM SIGMOD Record 26 (1997), 4–11.

17. Fertig, S., Freeman, E. and Gelernter, D. Lifestreams: An alternative to the desktop metaphor. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, B. C., 1996), 410–411.

18. Florescu, D., Inria, R.and Kossmann, D. Storing and querying XML data using an RDMBS. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 22, 3 (1999).

19. Franklin, M., Halevy, A. and Maier, D. From databases to dataspaces: A new abstraction for information management. ACM SIGMOD Record 34 (2005), 27–33.

20. Gantz, J. The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe. White paper. International Data Corporation, Framingham, MA, (Mar. 2008); http://www.emc.com/ collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe.pdf.

21. Gentner, D. and Stevens, A. L., eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., NJ, 1983.

22. Goodman, D. The Complete HyperCard Handbook. Bantam Books, NY, 2003.

23. Halasz, F. G., Moran, T. P. and Trigg, R. H. NoteCards in a Nutshell. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 17 (1987) 45–52.

24. Hayes, G., Pierce, J. S. and Abowd, G. D. Practices for capturing short important thoughts. In CHI ‘03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 2003), 904–905.

25. Kaplan, S. J., Kapor, M.D., Belove, E.J., Landsman, R. A. and Drake, T.R. Agenda: A personal information manager. Commun. ACM 33, 7 (July 1990), 105–116.

26. Mantei, M.M. Disorientation behavior in person-computer interaction. Communications Department, University of Southern California, 1982.

27. Marshall, C., Halasz, F. G., Rogers, R. A. and Janssen, W.C. Aquanet: A hypertext took to hold your knowledge in place. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Conference on Hypertext, (San Antonio, TX, 1991), 261–275.

28. Marshall, C. and Shipman, F. Spatial hypertext: designing for change. Commun. ACM 38, 8 (Aug.1995), 88–97.

29. McBrien, P. and Poulovassilis, A. A semantic approach to integrating XML and structured data sources. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Springer-Verlag, London, U, K, 2001, 330–345.

30. McHugh, J., Abiteboul, S., Goldman, R., Quass, D., and Widom, J. Lore: A database management system for semistructured data. ACM SIGMOD Record 26 (1997), 54–66.

31. Nelson, T. H. The heart of connection: Hypermedia unified by transclusion. Commun. ACM 38, 8 (Aug. 1985), 31–33.

32. Nelson, T. H. A Cosmology for a different computer universe: Data model, mechanisms, virtual machine and visualization infrastructure. J. Digital Information 5, 1 (2006).

33. Nelson, T.H. Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning, and deep re-use. ACM Computing Surveys 31, 4 (1999).

34. Novak, J. D. The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct them. Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, University of West Florida, 2003.

35. Papakonstantinou, Y., Garcia-Molina, H., and Widom, J. Object exchange across heterogeneous information sources. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Data Engineering (1995), 251–260.

36. Prud’Hommeaux, E. and Seaborne, A. SPARQL query language for RDF. W3C working draft. 4, (2006).

37. Trigg, R.H. and Weiser, M. TEXTNE T: A network-based approach to text handling. ACM Trans. Info. Systems 4, 1 (1986), 1–23.

38. Vdovjak, R. and Houben, G. J. RDF based architecture for semantic integration of heterogeneous information sources. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (2001), 51–57.

39. Widom, J. Trio: A system for integrated management of data, accuracy, and lineage. In Proceedings of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (2005).

40. Woods, W. A. What’s in a link: Foundations for semantic networks. in R. J. Brachman and J. Levesque, eds. Readings in Knowledge Representation, Morgan Kaufmann, 1985.