Roger Lueder

MyLifeBits: fulfilling the Memex vision

MyLifeBits is a project to fulfill the Memex vision first posited by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It is a system for storing all of ones digital media, including documents, images, sounds, and videos. It is built on four principles: (1) collections and search must replace hierarchy for organization (2) many visualizations should be supported (3) annotations are critical to non-text media and must be made easy, and (4) authoring should be via transclusion.

MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything

Developing a platform for recording, storing, and accessing a personal lifetime archive.

Passive capture and ensuing issues for a personal lifetime store

Passive capture lets people record their experiences without having to operate recording equipment, and without even having to give recording conscious thought. The advantages are increased capture, and improved participation in the event itself. However, passive capture also presents many new challenges. One key challenge is how to deal with the increased volume of media for retrieval, browsing, and organizing. This paper describes the SenseCam device, which combines a camera with a number of sensors in a pendant worn around the neck. Data from SenseCam is uploaded into a MyLifeBits repository, where a number of features, but especially correlation and relationships, are used to manage the data.

The MyLifeBits lifetime store

Storage trends have brought us to the point where it is affordable to keep a complete digital record of ones life, and capture methods are multiplying. To experiment with a lifetime store, we are digitizing everything possible from Gordon Bells life. The MyLifeBits system is designed to store and manage a lifetimes worth of data. MyLifeBits enables the capture of web pages, telephone, radio and television. This demonstration highlights the application of typed links and database features to make a lifetime store something that is truly useful.

Telling Stories with Mylifebits

User authored stories will always be the best stories, and authoring tools will continue to be developed. However, a digital lifetime capture permits storytelling via a lightweight markup structure, combined with location, sensor and usage data. In this paper, we describe support in the MyLifeBits system for such an approach, along with some simple authoring tools