Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management
a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several
levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands,
small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different
for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online,
but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information
management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of
CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization
such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering
specialized editors.
The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally
grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository.
The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data,
similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported
by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain
structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the
CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with
meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data.
Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application
HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be
synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the
CoIM ideas
