Personal Data for Personal Use: Vision or Reality?

The vision of collecting all of one's personal information into one searchable database has been around at least since Vannevar Bush's 1945 paper on the Memex System [2]. In the late 1990's, Gordon Bell and his colleagues at Microsoft Research built MyLifeBits [1, 6], which was the first serious attempt to build such a database. Since then, there has been continued interest in our community to build personal information management systems [3-5, 7, 8, 10]. Recently, the Solid Project proposes a more radical approach to personal information, arguing that all of one's data should reside in their own data pod, and applications should be redesigned to fetch data from the pod [9].