An adaptive semantic approach to personal information management

It is becoming increasingly difficult for knowledge workers to keep track of what they know and to organize their knowledge such that it can be retrieved, annotated, changed, and augmented. Most knowledge workers manage their personal information flow via their email client, Web browser, and the Windows file system. While user interfaces may have improved over time, the information management capability has not appreciably advanced. These systems do not understand the information they contain, so are unable to help the user manage it. The goal of the effort described here is to better help knowledge workers understand, manage, and use the overwhelming amount of information they receive and store. Two key features of this approach are capturing the basic semantic relationships of the user's personal information, and building intelligent tools to assist with the capture and management of these relationships.