A Novel PIM System and its Effective Storage Compression Scheme

Abstract

The increasingly large amount of personal information poses a critical problem to users. Traditional file organization in hierarchical directories is not suited to the effective management of personal information. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the current hierarchical file system and efficiently organize and maintain personal information, some new tools are expected to be invented. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme called concept space - a network of concepts and their associations – and use topic map as the underlying data model. We present a materialized view scheme to provide users with a flexible view of the file system according to their own cognition. We also reduce the storage requirement to save space usage of this system by borrowing some ideas from XML data management and contriving a novel and efficient data compression scheme. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the above idea, we have implemented a prototype personal information management system called NovaPIM and presented its system architecture. Extensive experiments show that our proposed scheme is both efficient and effective.