Davies, Stephen

Abstract: People often use powerful tools to manage the documents they encounter, but very rarely to store the mental knowledge they glean from those documents. Popcorn is a personal knowledge base: an experimental interface and database designed to store and retrieve a user’s accumulated personal knowledge. It aims to let the user represent information in a way that corresponds more naturally to their mental conceptions than simply text would, in part by making heavy use of transclusion: sharing items among multiple contexts. This paper describes the design rationale for the system, contrasting it with related efforts, and presents the results of deploying it to a group of volunteers who used it in real-world settings. The results, while revealing some limitations in the tool, and some challenges in coping with knowledge reorganization, suggest that the analysis underlying the design is useful, and that Popcorn is a powerful and effective tool for a variety of intellectual work.

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Abstract: Software tools abound for managing documents and other information sources, but are rarely used for managing the personal, subjective knowledge an individual gleans from them. Yet for at least sixty years there has been a thread of interest in building a system to support a personalized repository of knowledge. This survey defines such systems as “personal knowledge bases,” describes a number of important historical and recent examples, and gives a taxonomy of their principal characteristics. It concludes by broadly analyzing the design choices involved and sketching out an ideal solution.

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