[Design] Human Knowledge Database - Thinking Bigger

[Selva]

I'm having a slow night on call so I thought I'd jump in on this discussion.

I have a lot of respect for Jeff Hawkins’ work in general.  I think he was on the right track with Palm Desktop before he left Palm to form Handspring and then became focussed essentially on smartphone interface design.  As with the modest beginnings of the original Palm Desktop, I would much prefer Chandler to first and foremost organize my_life rather than to try and catalogue the external electronic universe.   

Even if Chandler was better at organizing the external world than Google or Yahoo, etc., it may still not be very useful for me if I can’t quickly and intuitively access my_world from within all the other unnecessary data I would be forced to interface with.  I would prefer Chandler focus on becoming a great PIM with the emphasis on the P i.e. "Personal" rather than an external search engine that also doubles as a PIM on the side.  

On the other hand, I would not mind it at all if Chandler could allow me to catalogue web content in my own "Personal" way while I'm surfing using an editable repository such as OpenOffice's Writer.  

For example, employing an integrated browser, the user could be given the option to either save web pages in HTML format as "frames" within a Writer document or have web pages converted to text and stored as a typical Writer text doc if he desires. 

Either way, an icon could be placed in the left margin of the Writer document next to the stored web content. As I mentioned before, additional features might be that if the pasted content happens to be in text format, then hovering the pointer over the icon could:

1) Highlight any pasted text in the Writer document from that URL with a colored background.

2) Cause a balloon to appear from the icon which displays the URL address of the icon.

Whether the pasted web content happens to be either text or a frame, clicking on the icon could take the user to the URL with Chandler's integrated browser.

On a related note, I heard that OpenOffice will be adding a database in the future.  David surely knows more about this than I.  If this is true then Chandler might be designed to interface with both Writer and the Database app for enabling even more powerful relational data storage of web content. For example, a medical professional might be able to better classify Writer documents (- which contain both web content and personal notes -) easily into the Database app by creating a personalized filing tree for topics such as Pediatrics, Cardiology, Internal Medicine, Opthalmology, Geriatrics, etc.

I think this type of personalized cataloguing system for web content would be much better goal than trying to become a catch all external search engine and PIM together.  JMHO.

Regards,
Selva


> 
> From: Arlo <acwhite at fastmail.fm>
> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 13:01:14 -0800
> To: design at osafoundation.org
> Subject: [Design] Human Knowledge Database - Thinking Bigger

[snip]

> 
> 	What if there was a single source you could go to for your answers?  A
> place with a sophisticated way of organizing data.  Some sort of fusion
> between forums and How-Tos where users are ranked and audited by each
> other.