Personal Information Wiki

Personal Information Wiki is the name of principle for an original way to gather, maintain and retrieve mainly human-only information, which can only be mirrored and copied by a computer, but not intelligently processed and used, in contrast to most statistical data, program data, etc.

The goal of the PIWiki is to provide a more intuitive way of managing personal information, or informations inside a given group of co-workers, as opposed to the traditional wikis for internet usage. PIWiki Systems are intended to be run on PDAs, Desktop Computers and Intranets.

Names and Namespaces

The PIWiki abandons resource names referring to physical storage. It uses namespaces and relative resource qualifiers. All intimate direct data the user puts into the PIWiki should be in the user's namespace. A namespace's mainpage is equivalent to the namespace name as a resource identifier. Thus //mywiki:Mainpage is the same as //mywiki. The slashes to mark the root is neccessary, since mywiki could appear as a resource name in another namespace. Any resource name (or page) can have any number of sub-pages. Then the resource name is a namespace itself, with the resource name beeing the mainpage. This seems difficult at first sight, but this is not so bad, since most users will only use the userspace of their PIWiki, using no namespace referencing at all.

Browsing the PIWiki

If, at anytime, their is a resource to be specified by the user, like a normal "choose file" situation, the user can browse the wiki itself. There are no traditional directories, instead the pages itself form a directory-like hierarchy, which is, in contrast, much more organical and intuitive. Remember, there is always the possibility to view recent changes, orphan pages and recent uploads.

Converting the PIWiki

There should be the possibility to back up a PIWiki on a PDA to the Desktop PC, and a standardized XML data language to make switching between different PIWiki systems possible. Given the puritanic and common nature of PIWIKis the important structural information is so similar, that different systems should be able to talk together quite easily, even if the storage is not standardized.

Intended Usage

The PIWiki is intended to be used for personal data. This may be addresses, persons, meetings, project info, important notes etc. A PIWiki should be WYSIWYG and the creation of a page should involve no more than two to five clicks plus input of the name. At any given time the user should have a clue which namespace he is viewing currently.

Benefits of the PIWiki

• The PIWiki should make it easy and quick to sketch infos and ideas to a PDA or Desktop Computer.
• The information entered is never lost, and can have various paths assigned to it, minimizing the possibility to loose track of some important piece of information.
• The PIWiki can search for pages that link to a certain page, and that can be a significant advantage over normal filesystems.
• All data is accessible by context, not by file system path.
• if in a LAN or WLAN or multiuser computer, you can change the information in the public-namespaces and your own info-universe, and you can protect your own data from viewing and editing if you wish so.