A Platform for Personal Information Management and Integration.

The explosion of the amount of information available in digital form has made search a hot research topic for the Information Management Community. While most of the research on search is focused on the WWW, individual computer users have developed their own vast collections of data on their desktops, and these collections are in critical need for good search tools. We describe the Semex System that offers users a flexible platform for personal information management. Semex has two main goals. The first goal is to enable browsing personal information by semantically meaningful associations. The challenge it to automatically create such associations between data items on one’s desktop, and to create enough of them so Semex becomes an indispensable tool. Our second goal is to leverage the personal information space we created to increase users ’ productivity. As our first target, Semex leverages the personal information to enable lightweight information integration tasks that are discouragingly difficult to perform with today’s tools.