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MyLifeBits: a personal database for
everything
January 1, 2006

Download PDF

View Link

Authors

Jim Gemmell

Gordon Bell

Roger Lueder
Published In

Communications of the ACM (CACM)
Journal
Communications of the ACM (CACM)
Pages
88-95
Volume
49
Number
1
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Copyright © 2004 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make
digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without
fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this
work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy
otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212)
869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at
ACM’s Digital Library –http://www.acm.org/dl/.

Abstract

Related Info
Abstract
MyLifeBits is a system that began in 2001 to explore the use of SQL to store all personal
information found in PCs. The system initially focused on capturing and storing scanned and
encoded archival material e.g. articles, books, music, photos, and video as well as everything
born digital e.g. office documents, email, digital photos. It evolved to have a goal of storing
everything that could be captured. The later included web pages, phone calls, meetings, room
conversations, keystrokes and mouse clicks for every active screen or document, and all the 1-2
thousand photos that SenseCam captures every day. In 2006 the software platform is used for
research including real time data collection, advanced SenseCams, and particular applications
e.g. health and wellness. This article expands on the January 2006, CACM publication of the
same name. MyLifeBits features, functions, and use experience are given in the main body,
followed by an appendix of future research and product needs that the research has identified.
Related Info
Related Files
 tr-2006-23.doc
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 MyLifeBits
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 Search and information retrieval
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