Memories for Life (see section3.4) is being discussed as a grand challenge for UK com- puting. It aims to address the challenges of storing autobiographical knowledge in the form of multimodal electronic media, and to identify any issues that may arise from such a situation. We believe that SW technologies could be adopted to help realise the
potential of such a vision. Given a system that could store a comprehensive collection of a lifetime’s worth of acquired electronic media a unified method of marking up this inherently heterogeneous data-set is needed. A vocabulary of terms and their relation- ships are presented as a means to annotate these “memory nuggets”, to encapsulate the semantics of these autobiographical memories. The OntoMedia ontology is a possible candidate. This ontology has been designed to allow the mark-up of literature, film, and other forms of narrative at the fabula level.
The Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project has produced tools to automate the annotation of textual media, (e.g. Armadillo (Ciravegna et al.,2004)), as well as a framework for semi-automating annotating photographs (Tuffield et al., 2006a). These tools and techniques are being applied to as many of the readily available sources of metadata as possible to create as rich a memory bank as possible while keeping the cognitive overhead to a bare minimum.
Motivating a Digital
Autobiographical Log
This chapter of the thesis will present the motivations behind the design and realisation of a framework for the capture and archival of autobiographical data. As technology advances and the Internet becomes more ubiquitous in nature, a greater proportion of our daily lives is being moved into cyberspace. Discussions and concerns about how more and more of our identity is being pushed online is presented and put forward as a key motivating factor for this thesis. The notion of lifelogging is then outlined as a method of empowering people to understand what information they are leaving behind in the form of digital traces. Within the scope of this thesis the term lifelogging is used to denote the proactive collection of personal information for personal gain and consumption. Discussions around the notion of privacy and identity in our networked world are outlined and presented as concepts which people should be educated about in order to promote the active safeguarding of peoples’ now networked identities. This is then followed by a section on how we can take the principles of lifelogging and use them to build up a collection of autobiographical facts about one’s life, in an extensible manner, which can be queried retrospectively to answer specific questions. Motivations to why people may want to collect their own autobiographical log are presented and are contextualised with respect to concepts of identity, and privacy in an ever more online world.
The Internet has enabled immediate access to a wealth of information changing the problem from one of a lack of access to pertinent data/information about a particular topic to that of trying to find relevant information from an ever expanding pot of het- erogeneous data. This problem is often referred to as infosmog (Shadbolt and O’Hara, 2003), and discussion follows to how the Semantic Web vision aims to tackle the problem of organising and retrieving structured data on a web-scale. Insight is then provided into the other key drivers for adopting the technologies presented in this thesis. Following a
discussion of how the Semantic Web aims to tackle the problem ofinfosmog are further justifications for using the aforementioned technology (see section 2.1) in terms of why one should adopt an open, non-proprietary data format given the intention of longevity and archival.
Further to the concepts of empowerment and personal identity, the notion of being able to make use of autobiographical facts to enrich one’s personal multimedia collection is presented as another key motivating factor to the study at hand. As digital storage costs decrease and digital capturing devices such as cameras, video recording devices, and location tracking hardware, to name but a few, become cheaper and can be seen to be slowly merging into a single portable device1, we have witnesses a phenomenal rise in the generated of digital multimedia. The motivations behind capturing a personal lifelog to be used to add context to a personal multimedia collection is presented, followed by a discussion around how personal multimedia items are moving out of shoe-boxes and are being situated in the social space that is the Internet.
This chapter then outlines the activities of a few key research initiatives which have informed and inspired the work undertaken. Here discussion will focus on the proposed impact of the listed research initiatives, and how the author thinks they will influence concepts such as identity, and privacy in an online world rich of personal information. Finally, this chapter is rounded off with use cases aimed to illustrate the potential benefits of capturing an autobiographical log.
3.1
Lifelogging and the Disappearance of the Body
This section will examine the technologies behind Lifelogging, and discuss the concerns relating to the capture and storage of privately held autobiographical logs. Many of the concerns surrounding the capture of the entirety of a human’s life have been discussed within the context of the “Memories for Life” UK Grand Challenge for Computer Science (M4L) which is presented towards the end of this chapter (see3.4). It is also clear that there are likely to be privacy concerns about Lifelogging practise and technology (Allen, 2008). The structure of the section is as follows. The following section will set out some of the principles of Lifelogging, and highlight some of the more prominent efforts in this space (further detail can be found in the background section of this thesis2). Then I will examine pragmatic aspects, such as the sorts of information that Lifelogging is likely to draw upon, the uses to which it might be put and so on. Next, I shall examine some of the issues surrounding privacy, identity, and empowerment for the Lifelogger.
1
Apple’s iPhone http://www.apple.com/iphone/, or Nokia’s N95 http://www.nokia.co.uk/ find-products/all-phones/nokia-n95are two perfect examples of such devices