A View on Views
Abstract
This paper presents an approach for designing a personal information management system which addresses two main deficiencies in data access and information retrieval: the scattering of related information across different applications and locations, and the cluttering of information which creates difficulties finding data and concentrating on a specific task. The system design uses the notion of a view which is extremely versatile as an additional level of abstraction above files, folders, and desktops. A view defines the context of a specific task or subject, and can include and display information according to semantic ordering of relevancy. Semantic information is gathered in an attribute database using a novel attribute delegation mechanism which constantly augments the items with attribute information. An initial prototype implementation is under way and initial results are discussed.
