The Haystack Project is investigating approaches designed to let people manage their
information in ways that make the most sense to them. By removing arbitrary application-created
barriers, which handle only certain information “types” and relationships
as defined by the developer, we aim to let users define their most effective arrangements
and connections between views of information. Such personalization of information
management will dramatically improve everyone’s ability to find what they
need when they need it. We are currently exploring these ideas:
management of your stray thoughts - The
Jourknow project is re-envisioning how you live and work with information scraps
-- the small notes and thoughts we deal with every day. What if your computer could do
much better than being a digital sticky note application? What if it could remember where
you were, or what you meant, and possibly even help you get it done?
personal user modeling -
PLUM is a research platform for investigating how we can make computers more
personal while at the same time preserving people's privacy and keeping control
within the hands of users. PLUM's philosophy is make people more aware of, and
to keep track of all of the personal information that is available on their personal
computing devices, while at the same time making it possible to leverage this
information to benefit them.
the universal information client - The
Haystack client provides everyday information management capabilities such
as scheduling appointments, reading and creating email, and organizing photo albums.
It explores the bringing of information to a single location in order to let users'
focus on information instead of programs.
lightweight structured data publishing -
Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets
you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations
by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.
relationship based exploration - The Relo
plugin for Eclipse is designed to help users explore and understand portions of
large information spaces. We are currently focusing on the software domain.
re-finding previously seen information - The
Re:Search extension is designed to let users of the Firefox browser have
their past seach results seamlessly integrated into the current results.
bookmarks on steroids - The Piggy-Bank
extension is designed to let users of the Firefox browser collect and browse "semantic
data" linked from ordinary web pages (in the form of RDF).
