Customizable application for personal information management

Abstract

As digital content becomes increasingly pervasive in our daily lives, next-generation organizational tools must be developed to help end users curate that information. The information management tools available today are limited in several ways. They are either restrictive in how users define and organize their data, or they offer few options in how users can view and interact with that data. In this thesis, we introduce a new application geared toward the layman end user to help resolve this lack of personalization when managing data. With this tool, users can store any collection of information (i.e. to do lists, address book, DVD collection), customize how they want to view and browse that data, and create any number of visualizations for the same data set or overlapping sets of data. For example, a user might want to manage an address book for a collection of all contacts, and manage a different set of items involving all research-related items, including colleagues, in another visualization. This tool allows her to do this without duplicating the overlapping data set for contact information of colleagues, enabling her to make changes to an item in one visualization and see that change applied to any other visualization that includes the same item. Moreover, users can import data from other sources, as well as share their data with others either with a visualization, such that the receiver can interact with the visualization the user has already created, or as raw data, such that the receiver can create his or her own visualization of the data.