Information Management

Data is not Information, Information is not Knowledge, Knowledge is not Wisdom

Information has an extremely important position in transhumanistic thinking. We will soon be able to control vast amounts of energy, manipulating matter from the nanoscale up to the megascale. What remains important (except energy, time and matter) is information, how things are ordered, and the necessary intelligence to handle it.

At present we have growing problems with information overload: too much information that could be relevant, and too little time and attention to review it well. Finding powerful ways of organizing, finding and evaluating information are necessary to counteract information overload and bring about the next step: the actual transmission and storage of knowledge. Information management is the first step to true intelligence amplification.

Sections

General and Other Sites
User Interfaces
Enhanced Reality
Wearable Computers and Smart Environments
Hypertext
Information Filtering, Sorting and Visualisation
Agents

Other Sites
Books
See Also

General and Other Sites

We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload by Mark R. Nelson. What is information overload, and how to deal with it?
The Future of Information Filtering by Paul Canavese.
Institute of Memetic Engineering by Alexander Chislenko.
A complete history of humans and technology by Alexander Chislenko. A short essay about how life and intelligence have attempted to handle information in the past.
Human-Computer Interaction in Yahoo

User Interfaces

The user interface is crucial for any system. A bad interface can ruin a tool, while good interfaces creates a symbiosis between tool and user.

Social

Turingware: Collaborative Ensembles of Humans and Software by Susanne Hupfer (Omnibus, Dec. 1993).
Some thoughts on multi-agent systems and "hyper-economy" by Alexander Chislenko. How can multi-agent systems (with both humans and AI) be coordinated usefully?
Informal Organization papers at Xerox PARC.

Software

Affective Computing. Including emotions into the user interface will probably make it more usable.
Lifestreams. A temporal alternative to the desktop metaphor. See also Mirror Worlds Technologies.

Hardware

The Eyegaze System. An eye tracking system that acts as a visual mouse.
Text Input Devices of various kinds by Bob Rosenberg. Qwerty isn't the only possible keyboard.

Enhanced Reality

The user interface of reality certainly needs improving, just as we need to improve computer interfaces a great deal too before enhanced reality, intelligence amplification and uploading becomes useful.

Enhanced Reality by Alexander Chislenko. About how we can improve the user-interface of reality.
Trends: Virtual Assembly by Larry Krumenaker (Technology Review). How enhanced reality could be used to simplify assembly and repair.
The Intelligent Room: Intelligent Enhanced Reality. A project at MIT about an intelligent environment that interprets and augments activities occurring within it.
Augmented Reality. Some of the current work by Ronald Azuma on see-through displays.
Studierstube: A multi-user augmented reality environment, where several users can view the same virtual objects and interact with them (for example, visualization of scientific data sets).
A Survey of Augmented Reality by Ronald T Azuma. A very good overview of current systems.

Wearable Computers and Smart Environments

Information should be available anywhere it is needed. Hence it is interesting to develop ways of being able to access information everywhere, to truly integrate it in the environment or the users.

Wearable FAQ
Wearable Computers at the MIT Media Lab. Essentially these systems create the beginning of a true exoself.
Smart Clothing by Steve Mann. Integrating computers into clothing.
Smart clothing: Turning the tables (Gzipped PostScript file). About how wearable computers can be used to enhance privacy and freedom.
Wearable, Tetherless, Computer-Mediated Reality (with possible future applications to the disabled) by Steve Mann. How wearable computers can act as a visual assistant and memory prosthetic.
The wearable remembrance agent: A system for augmented memory by Bradley J. Rhodes.
New Scientist Interview of Thad Starner about wearable computing.
Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging by Steve Mann (Computer Vol. 30, No. 2, February 1997).
Augmented Reality Through Wearable Computing. How wearable computers can be used to implement personal enhanced reality.
Intra-Body Communications : The Next Craze? (from The Armchair Scientist).
Personal Area Networks (PAN): Near-Field Intra-Body Communication by Thomas Zimmerman at the Physics and Media Group at MIT Media Lab. About how information can be transmitted through the body between worn electronic devices (and possibly implanted ones?).
Personal Area Networks: Near-field intrabody communication by T. G. Zimmerman. Using the body as an information carrier.
Human-powered wearable computing by T. Starner. The different possible energy-sources for wearable computers.
Tech Reports and Publications from the MIT Vision and Modeling Group. Many interesting papers.
A Wearable Computer for Use in Microgravity Space and Other Non-Desktop Environments by Edgar Matias, I. Scott MacKenzie and William Buxton.
Wearable Computer Systems at Carnegie Mellon University
Wearable links at Neurosystems
WetPC. A wearable for underwater use.
The TurboTortoise. A Linux system small enough to fit in a pocket.
Mobile Computing in Yahoo
Ubiquitous Computing page by Mark Weiser. Instead of living in a virtual computer-generated world, we should live in a real world with ubiquitious computers.

Hypertext

Hypertext extends the concept of text into a multidimensional form of communication, where documents can refer to each other. This structure has many advantages, and may be used to represent knowledge better than normal text.

Enhancing the World Wide Web: Social Software for the Evolution of Knowledge at the Foresight Institute.

Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge by K. Eric Drexler. How hypertext can improve the spread and growth of knowledge.
How Can we Leverage Corporate Influence to Catalyze the Development and Adoption of an Improved Hypertext Standard? by David Forrest. Why we need a better hypertext system than the WWW.
CritSuite, Critical Discussion Tools for the Web. Software for commenting, viewing and navigating the web.

Citescapes: Supporting Knowledge Construction on the Web by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan. Discusses the importance and possibilities of looking at what documents links to a given document for judging it.
Paths to the Singularity by Daniel G. Clemmensen. About the Singularity and the events leading up to it, with a discussion of the >Web idea.
The Living Textbook by Dieter Ebner. An idea for a public domain hypertext textbook with all available information.
Hypertext Theory in Yahoo

Information Filtering and Sorting

Raw information is useless, it needs to be structured and organized so that relevant information is possible to find and new relationships can be discovered.

Automated Collaborative Filtering and Semantic Transports by Alexander Chislenko.
Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents by Yoelle S. Maarek and Israel Z. Ben Shaul. A way to organize bookmarks based on similarity of content.
Understanding and comparing web search tools (Bush Library, Hamline University). A good resource on the web search tools around.
Intelligent Filtering of Computer-Mediated Human Communication
The Message Rating System Proposal by Alexander Chislenko. Sorting information through user ratings.
PITS: Populated Information Terrains. Converting databases into virtual environments where users can interact.
Atlas of Cyberspaces
Visualizing the Structure of the World Wide Web in 3D Hyperbolic Space by Tamara Munzner and Paul Burchard. The properties of hyperbolic space makes it useful for visualizing graphs; there already exists some hyperbolic web-visualization systems such as Hyperbolic Tree from InXight.
Websom - Self-Organizing Map for Internet Exploration. Using self-organizing maps to organize information.
NaviGraph. A 3D applet that shows information in 2+1 dimensions. There is a paper called Exploiting Orthogonality in Three Dimensional Graphics for Visualizing Abstract Data by James Wen about it.
Hyperspace, a system for realtime visualisation of the structure of a set of web pages being browsed.
Bibliometric Mapping. Turning bibliographic data into maps of knowledge.

Agents

Agents are programs that act in some sense independently of the users, doing services for them like gathering information, routine work or keeping watch on various things.

Agents Info. Links to relevant information.
Software Agents - A Review by Brendan Berney.
Instructible agents: Software that just keeps getting better by H. Lieberman and D. Maulsby. About agents that learn from the user.
Technical reports of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Arizona. Several reports deals with automated knowledge discovery and meeting facilitation agents.
Letizia: An Agent That Assists Web Browsing by Henry Lieberman. An agent helping the user browse the WWW by exploring links from the current location and suggesting items of interest.