Light Seminar: Personal Information Management Systems

Instructor: Thu D. Nguyen (tdnguyen@cs.rutgers.edu)
Time & Location: Tuesday 11am-12noon, CoRE B (305)

Note:

• Location of seminar has been changed to CoRE B (305)
• Schedule and readings will henceforth be posted on the course Sakai site. If you are interested in the seminar and cannot access the Sakai site, contact me (Thu) at above email address.
• Remember, no class 9/8.

Content:

We will be studying personal information systems (PIMs).  Historically, personal information has been stored in file systems and/or small databases (that themselves are stored in file systems).  The landscape is rapidly changing, however, because of the proliferation of online services and information sharing communities.  Today, the personal information of a typical user is spread out across file systems (e.g., PCs and laptops), online services (e.g., Facebook and blogs), data feeds (e.g., IMAP email and RSS), etc.  The overhead of managing and tracking this fragmented information landscape is unacceptable.  Amelie Marian and I are currently guiding a project to build an abstraction will allow users to view, search, and managed their distributed personal information as a single whole.  In this seminar, we will be reading papers to provide background for this research project, as well as learn about related work.  The papers will be drawn from OS/file systems, databases, and information retrieval.  Should be fun!

Readings:

Under construction.  I'm listing interesting papers in no particular order below.  We will determine a schedule soon.

Motivation:

• We will read something from this ACM special issue on Personal Information Management.  (I'll post the papers later but you can get ACM papers from the digital library through the Rutgers library.)

From the Systems community:

• We will read about semantic file systems.  Here's an interesting link listing some of these systems.  The Gifford "Semantic File System" (SFS) is an oldie but goodie.

From the Database community:

• We will read something from the Haystack project.
• We will read something from the SEMEX project.
• J.-P. Dittrich, M. A. Vaz Salles.  iDM: A Unified and Versatile Data Model for Personal Dataspace Management, VLDB 2006.
  • We might also read something else from the iMeMex project.