The Associative PDA 2.0: A Prototype of an Innovative Mobile System for Personal Information Management

Personal Information Management (PIM) deals with information that is relevant to its owner and hiseveryday life, e.g. addresses, emails, or all kindsof personal documents. Since most PIM activitieshappen in transit, mobile support is indispensable. There do exist many mobile systems to support PIM,but without any adequate solution yet. The majorcause is the lack of an appropriate underlyinginformation structure: common hierarchicalstructures are inefficient in terms of informationretrieval, which, however, constitutes an importanttask in PIM. This work addresses this and more problems. It describes a system based on anassociative network of information instead of a conventional hierarchical file system: all personal information is connected with further information, representing a semantically meaningful coherency. Information can either be associated manually or generated fully automatically from context information, such as date/time, location, and people present at a location. This book describes the development process including a long-time evaluation. It addresses all developers and designers who place value on user-friendly software.