SemanticLIFE

Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush coined the idea of Memex as "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. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory". The SemanticLIFE project is an attempt to come a step closer to Vannevar Bush's vision. Recently we can observe a mushrooming of new projects aiming at some of the goals of Bush' innovative ideas. This is mainly caused by the racy technological development which opens new large realization potentials. An indicator for the narrowing of the discrepancy between the visions of Memex versus its realization is the announcement of Memories for life - Managing information over a human lifetime as one of the seven Grand Challenges for Computing Research by the UK Computing Research Committee. The ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences is another indicator for the maturity of our present time to implement such systems.