Diary generation from personal information models to support contextual remembering and reminiscence

Human remembering is a process vulnerable to producing errors in addition to unintentional forgetting which is often undesired. To support contextualised remembering and reminiscence we propose an application that is able to write diaries on demand. Without any considerable effort these diaries can be generated for every period of a person's life that is reflected in their personal information model. This model is a cornerstone of the Semantic Desktop approach which serves as the ecosystem that helps us realize our vision. In this paper, we describe our concept in more detail and also provide an overview of related diary and timeline applications. Additionally, we present a proof of concept implementation as well as results of an early user experience evaluation. Finally, we give an outlook on remaining challenges to be tackled as well as possible future work.