Talk Topic: Why Everyone Should be Their own Database Administrator, UI Designer, Application Developer, and Web Site Builder, and How They Can
David Karger, MIT LCS
January 30, 2008

Abstract
Although computers are touted as tools that help us manage information, they often seem to hinder us instead. They fail to display, or even record, some aspect of the information that we need. They clutter their presentations with distracting inessential aspects. Information is fragmented over multiple applications and sites, making it hard to record, visualize, or navigate important connections. The operation we want to apply to data locked inside one site or application is only available at a different one.

End users can fix many of these problems themselves, if they are given the right levers for reshaping information management tools and repositories to suite their needs. In this talk, I will survey my group's  explorations of three such levers: a simple, structred-but-sloppy, information model for holding whatever framework that can flex to present that arbitrary information; and tools that let the end users "edit" (rather than program) and share information views and workspaces that are appropriate for the data they want to record and the tasks they want to perform. Our approach offers a way to build personalized information management application for users' own data, and to create useful aggregations and visualizations of information dispersed over the standard and Semantic Web.