Connected Information Management

Society is currently inundated with more information than ever,
making efficient management a necessity. Alas, most of current
information management suffers from several levels of
disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated
islands, small notes don’t fit into traditional application
categories, navigating the data is different for each kind of data;
data is either available at a certain computer or only online, but
rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach
to information management that avoids these ways of
disconnectedness. The core idea of CoIM is to keep all information
in a central repository, with generic means for organization such
as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by
offering specialized editors. The central repository eliminates the
islands of application-specific data and is formally grounded by a
CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF
repository. The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based
editing of this data, similar to database applications such as MS
access. Further kinds of data are supported by extending RDF, as
follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain structured
text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported
by the CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly
captured and annotated with meta-data. Generic means for
organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data. Ubiquitous
availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the
web application HYENA/Web and the desktop application
HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be synchronized between these
applications. The applications were used to validate the CoIM
ideas.