If you’ve ever felt trapped by technology—limited by the information management capabilities of software products—you’re not alone. Patrick Dubroy can feel your pain.
“While the amount of information that the average person deals with has increased dramatically in the last 20 years,” Dubroy says, “file systems have hardly changed at all.” What we need, he says, is “a system that will make it easier to manage and navigate the large amounts of rich and diverse information that people deal with every day.”
In an article for Boxes and Arrows, Dubroy proposes a new “information management platform” that is built on a common information management framework that other applications can build upon.
“Having a common platform for developers to build upon would give us greater consistency between applications—they would have the features we expect, and these features would work in the same way,” Dubroy writes. “Integration between applications would be much easier, as they would have a lingua franca for exchanging rich information. Different kinds of data could be mixed together, allowing users to easily organize their data in a way that makes sense to them.”
