Your Life – On the Web

Microsoft researchers are working on ways to create a "back-up brain" that they say will do a much better job of containing and cataloguing every picture you take, every document you write or conversation you record, just as a start.

The scientists working on the project believe that the database of your life could hold an enormous collection of items that are automatically catalogued and will be as easy to search and retrieve as using the now ultra popular search engine – Google. It is a surrogate brain multimedia database that chronicle's life events and makes them searchable.

What exactly, is this project?

The MyLifeBits research group is based at Microsoft's research lab in San Francisco.

For any single individual, the project aims to put all personal documents and media online, to allow time-shifting, and location independence (i.e. you can still access the information when you move on to a new location and there is no time limit) when you are connected to MyLifeBits. One researcher has already captured 10 gigabytes of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally.

Perhaps more importantly, why would anyone to do this?

The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated; we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on more reliable of entities -- technology.

How will anyone be able to store this much information?

With HUGE hard disks. It is estimated that within five years a terabyte of data storage, that is about 1,000 gigabytes, will cost about $300 or less, allowing people to buy at least that much per year. If this seems a bit vague, consider how much data can be crammed into a terabyte of storage space. A terabyte can hold about 3.6 million 300-kilobyte images or 290 hours of good quality video.

To give you a little more idea of how much a terabyte is, if you like photography, you could snap 100,000 JPEGs and still only use 10 GB. Storing 250 thousand faxes will consume another gigabyte. A music collection of a few hundred CD’s turns into about 20 GB. To really start using space, how about a 100 DVD collection storing 250 hours of HDTV on your hard drive, that would consume only 400 GB, a bit less than half you hard drive. Of course if you wanted to, you could record many hours of television.

What are going to be biggest challenges?

The technical challenge will be to ensure that the stored information will be readable by future devices and equipment. The system is being developed by creating software to support MyLifeBits, beginning with a MyLifeBits Server that can support the capture, storage, and management of personal media, including: TV with Web enhancement, radio, personal music collections, and home video.

Researchers have also realised that the hard part is not filling the database but deciding how everything in it should be organised.

How are people going to find the “memories” they have stored?

Currently the researchers are working on something called smart tags for each item that is stored. This allows them to be searched for in different ways. It also records any relationships between those of other items in the storage.

They are also working on different methods to automate the tagging process to make it easier to build up the database.

For instance, searching for a particular date would bring up a list of all the things an individual stored away on that particular day or days. Searching for the name of a friend or colleague would bring a more diverse list, it might be organised chronologically or by theme for example.

It is suggest that many people already have a great deal of important moments in their lives recorded in one form or another. However, shoeboxes full of photos, piles of documents and scattered video tapes take much longer to search than the repository of information that is being envisaged here.

Where on earth did such an idea come from?

Surprisingly perhaps, the idea of a vast repository of personal information was first floated way back in 1945. The thought was suggested by a US academic, Vannevar Bush in an article he wrote “As We May Think “ for a monthly magazine.

In his article Mr Bush invented the term Memex for such a device. He said it would be "an enlarged intimate supplement to memory." He stated that: “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility”

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au