A Personal Memex System Using Memex Ontology and Web Services

Researches on the system that automatically record and retrieve one's everyday life is relatively actively worked recently. These systems, called personal memex or life log, usually entail dedicated devices such as SenseCam in MyLifeBits project. This research paid attention to the modern digital devices that people use everyday such as cellular phones, credit cards, digital cameras, and e-mails. If one can systematically store everyday life that is stored in those device-related Web pages (e.g., phone records in the cellular phone company) or inside the devices themselves and later refer the information quickly, its value will be highly accepted as a personal secondary memory. The data collection agent in the proposed system, called MyMemex, collects the personal life log ldquoWeb datardquo using the Web services that the Web sites provide and stores them into the server. The ldquofile datardquo stored in the off-line digital devices are also loaded into the server. Each of the file data or Web data is viewed as a memex event that can be described by 4W1H form. The memex event ontology is used to transform the various types of data to the standard 4W1H form. Users can view their life log chronologically and search them by keywords. Moreover, the life logs can be viewed as a diary or story style by converting the memex events to sentences. The related memex events are grouped by a heuristic classification method to be displayed as an "episode". Without using the dedicated devices such as SenseCam, we design and implement the Web service-based personal memex system that automatically records the important personal life events.