In my earlier post I wrote about Sider, an information management platform. Read it if you want to learn more about what it is. Today I want to explain why I think it's important and why I'm spending time on it. Actually, I'm not working alone. I'm doing most of the stuff, writing code, documentation, etc. My partner, Igor, helps by providing feedback, helping me analyze problems and supplying new ideas.
Igor thought of the Sider and I liked it, so I decided to dedicate my time to it. We both store a lot of information on the computer, notes, e-mails, contacts, project plans, etc. By the way, information is a collection of data chunks with relationships between those chunks. A text document or a table is data, but a collection of text documents organized in such a way that connection between each document is visible, is information.
Unfortunately, current state of managing data on computers is rather weak compared to what is possible. Most programs can handle only a few documents types, and almost all of them are not very extendable. For example, Microsoft Word is focused at working with text, Excel mostly works with tabular data, OneNote stores notes in a tree-like structure, Outlook stores tasks and e-mail in lists a tree (but each task node cannot be a tree node).
As a result I need to split information I want to store on the computer between different programs. My to-do list is in one program - ToDoList, but for recurring tasks that I need reminder on I use Outlook. To store my notes I use Wikipad. To write this blog post I use Word, but to post it - w.blogger. To work with tables (and I do every day, to track time I spend on different projects) I use Excel. For mind maps I might use FreeMind. To work with my information I need to have 5-6 programs to be running and constantly switch between them.
In most cases these programs work separately and I can't reference Wikipad note in a ToDoList task (I can reference wiki file, but usually that's not enough). This need to split up between programs happens because each program was created to operate a single domain and solve only a few problems. In addition many of these programs are inflexible and it's hard to extend them if I want to add a missing feature.
Even when I can create custom extensions for the application, I need to learn it's language and API (Wikipad uses python, Microsoft Office - VBA or .NET, ToDoList is in C++). Moreover, extensions supported are limited in scope. I might be able to add a new view or report, but adding support for a new document type is usually impossible. At best I can try to adopt existing data types, but this is complicated, error-prone and time-consuming.
Sider started off as a more theoretical project, but evolved into an application to address all these problems. Sider stores information in a most-suitable, more intelligent, innter-connected way (a graph is stored as a graph, a tree as a tree, a table as a table, etc.) Working with any information on the computer should be easier and more natural, and that's what Sider is intended to do. Sider makes it easier to reuse information by referencinf it, importing and exporting, and so on.
Sider is flexible and easy to extend. There's no need to try and force existing data type to be suitable for your needs. You can either extend existing type or create new one from scratch, or combine both methods.
Another goal for Sider is to present data in the best way for the user. What is best will change depending on what the user wants to do so it is important to support a lot of different views.
Sider is about helping people to use computers for what they were invented for, to work with data. Of course, it will not solve all problems. When released it will be quite limited compared to most of the existing programs. It probably will never be as good as Word at working with text, or as good as Excel at working with tables. However, it will offer a new and unique approach at managing information and helping people to solve different problems.
In the next post I will talk more about Sider architecture and technologies used. Hopefully it will be an interesting post.