Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and according to Dictionary.com [2], serendipity means “good fortune or
luck.” This word also became Britain's favorite word according to The Word,
London's Festival of Literature 2000, which commissioned a nationwide sur-
vey, reported by BBC online news on September 18, 2000 [3].
The need to capture serendipitous moments and to save and share them
with others in digital ways has become important through the necessity of
remembering so many things such as names of people, places, and events
and to identify relevant information and evidence in our minds. Without
a digital means to store joyful moments there is a possibility that we might
forget or lose them forever.
The novelty of our work therefore lies in the consideration of memory rela-
tionships, both within an individual's serendipitous moments and across the
serendipitous moments of multiple individuals, as a primary consideration
of our life memory database system. We believe the use of a peer-to-peer
(P2P) network structure as a means to reflect such relationships to be unique,
yet with genuine benefits in regards to the identification of relevant memo-
ries and sharing of memories between individuals.
12.1.2 Problem Statement
Many researchers refer to LifeStreams [4], MyLifeBits [5-8], Total Recall [9]
and Haystack [10] as successful personal digital management systems (human
memories) because they considered the problems of different types of media.
Each of these projects has tried to establish a good personal database man-
agement system. Problems relating to the management of personal digital
data (especially serendipitous moments), the sharing of them with others, the
way data should be presented, and the methods for allowing understanding
of such information and content are becoming increasingly complex. In the
context of personal serendipity moments, the complexity of digital data has
increased significantly in the recent past with the introduction of affordable
digital cameras (still image and video), portable audio recorders and play-
ers, and smart mobile phones capable of supporting, capturing, and stor-
ing information as text (e-mails, instant messages), images, video, GPS, and
sound.
We have encountered the following four challenges in the design of a sys-
tem to store personal serendipity moments:
•
Capturing the semantics of the information that may be spread
across different media
Supporting efficient and effective interactions between users and
•
the information through P2P networking
Providing media content analysis to reflect users' identities
•
•
Providing privacy policies, security, and access control to personal
life digital data
