WO2010087782A2

WO2010087782A2 - Dynamic multidimensional knowledge clustering, management and representation system

Info

Publication number: WO2010087782A2
Application number: PCT/SG2010/000027
Authority: WO
Inventors: Eng Lee Soh; Koon Yiak Goh
Original assignee: Eng Lee Soh; Koon Yiak Goh
Priority date: 2009-01-31
Filing date: 2010-01-28
Publication date: 2010-08-05
Also published as: SG163456A1

Description

DYNAMIC MULTIDIMENSIONAL KNOWLEDGE CLUSTERING, MANAGEMENT AND REPRESENTATION SYSTEM

FIELD OF INVENTION

The present invention relates to information systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a dynamic, multidimensional knowledge clustering, management and representation system.

BACKGROUND OF INVENTION

The present invention introduces a dynamic, multidimensional knowledge clustering, management and representation system.

In this information age where information is vast and easily available, providing focused relevant results and finding precise desired information or knowledge remain an uphill task. When the amount of knowledge and information increases to a substantial level whereby it is nearly impractical for the user to remember and locate information via their paths, time is lost when the user has to browse haphazardly within the vast space of information trying to locate the desired information. Typical systems used to manage aspects of information such as storage, exploration and search are becoming increasingly inadequate at providing users the ability to navigate through this vast information space effectively and efficiently. Even with the utilisation of document or content management systems, which often introduce entire systems of user or information protocols which users have to adhere to in order to improve information findability through standardisation of information organisation structures, users still face findability problems, and at the same time are increasingly frustrated with seemingly unintuitive protocols. Other systems generally provide a content keyword search, a pre-entered meta value to the information, or a structured taxonomy of single dimensional multiple levels system. These systems do not allow the user to express much information for the information, and retrieval will be tedious with non trivial amounts of information. In the case of files, filenames and storage paths are inadequate at describing the meaning of the items. Keyword search on the content and meta values provide better meaning but may introduce more irrelevant results which cause so much clutter that the desired information is effectively hidden within the returned results. There is typically no easy way for augmenting information on or above the disparate forms of information available. Beside, if an organisation system is shared among a group of users, users are not able to use their own unique ways of storing the information or labelling the information in such a way that they are familiar with and which is relevant to their different contexts and perspectives. Hence, it is tedious for the different users to understand the shared organisation structure which is often foreign and counter-intuitive, so as to be able to navigate and access the information they desire. Thus, sharing of information is also not optimised.

Sharing of information between peers and continuity of domain knowledge to successors are important aspects in a constructive organisation. Without dynamic tools which the users can easily express their ideas into or above the information spaces within the computer systems, collaboration is hard as users find it difficult to express ideas in the very first place. As a result, collaborative systems which work well and allow users to share expressive ideas with information are few and far between. Furthermore, users can often work on more than one project, and logically information can often be re-used across the different projects, albeit in different contexts and perspectives. However, current systems do not enable users to do this effectively, and often we see copies of duplicated information and information that are not synced nor updated to the latest versions when users try to share information with different users or different projects. When users collaborate on projects, often disparate information from diverse sources are used. These different forms of information cannot be easily consolidated into a single platform where they can be worked on or correlated together. Furthermore, the dimension of time and changes is very important in collaboration. There is no easy way for all the changes with respect to time, for all the different forms of information, to be viewed, traced, modified and used from a single place.

Information becomes relevant knowledge when it is well structured differently with accordance to different contexts, user perspectives, user needs, relations with other information, etc. Thus, for any information, different forms of representation are necessary in order for the user to fully exploit the potential the information can bring. In current systems, information often exist on islands of their own, and although relationships often exist implicitly between them, these relations are hidden because of the lack of dynamism, flexibility and multidimensional representation capabilities in the information representation subsystems. As a result, information is often presented the way they have been authored or stored. Even today, many systems simply present information as they are stored in directories on the user's system. In effect, the only visible information the user is able to readily see is the content of the information when it is explicitly shown, and the path of the information. In certain online systems, meta values and tags are introduced to bring another dimension above the information, allowing users to utilise another aspect of the information based on content and relations. However, these concepts are still in the stage of early infancy. In order to make full use of the value information is able to bring us, we have to let information and knowledge flourish in the high dimension space they naturally belong in, freed from the constraints of low level details such as path, locality or type and format of information. Next, we have to provide users the tools, systems and intuitive environments where they can handle rich information spaces with ease.

The present invention introduces a dynamic, multidimensional knowledge clustering, management and representation system. Through the many possible embodiments possible of the present invention, the invention overcomes the foregoing and other disadvantages stated above, and allows users to fully harness the potential of information.

EXPLANATION OF TERMS USED IN THE INVENTION

General User - A user is an information processor, possibly a human, computer or process.

Computer Environment - A computer system, computerised system, or a plurality of computer or computerised systems interconnected in various topologies, interfaces to computer environments, or systems containing computer environments. A computer system can be a system made up of processing units, of various scales and processing power; with possibly other computer related units attached such as visual displays or input devices.

Information - Data, interpreted data, user inputted data, interpreted user inputted data, system fetched data, interpreted system fetched data, system generated data, interpreted system generated data, and any form of derivatives of any form of information.

Inputs - External information the system is aware of, which may be used or processed by the system. Inputs may be used by the system through maintaining of references, through copies of the inputs brought into the system, or through inputs directly entered into the system by the user.

Information Space - Totality of information and related information accessible and available for use by the system.

Information Structure - The configuration formed by the information and the relationships between the information in the information space.

Information Entities — Information objects that can exist within or make up the information space. Information entities enrich the information space by adding new dimensions to the information. Some information entities are defined in the section "Information Entities', including Inputs, Reps, Infogroups, Organisation Structures, Metas, Associations, Periodicals and Views.

System Layers

Storage Layer - Consists of subsystems that store information inputted into or created by the system. Operations Layer - Consists of subsystems that operate upon and process information. Representation Layer - Consists of subsystems that presents information or results of operations and allow the user to manipulate information through means of controlling the information operations subsystems.

Information Entities

Reps - Representations of information. Reps allow the system to work and represent all information regardless of lower level details of the data such as type, location, granularity, life time, editability and so on.

Infogroups - Collections of reps and organisation structures recursively. Infogroups allow related or unrelated units of information to be grouped together.

Organisation Structures - Structures that organise reps and organisation structures. Organisation structures allow information to be organised via different structures, such as hierarchies, ontological structures, graphs, lists, tables, etc.

Metas - Additional information about information entities. By providing additional information about information entities in the system, metas describe the information entity above their basic content and meaning. Examples of metas may include the authors of files, short descriptions of documents, user comments and annotations. Metas are dependent on the parent information entity they describe.

Associations - Creates relationships between information entities. For example, the associator allows an email in the system to be associated with a note in a text document, or a contact of a person to be associated with a link to a website. The information associated can be totally unrelated or exist in different locations.

Periodicals - Evolution of information entities over time. By providing various functions, such as the ability to review past versions of information, to revert to past versions of information, and also to create important captures, which saves the state of the information at the point in time, over the period of evolution of the information, periodicals allow the evolution of information entities to be managed by the periodicals manager.

Views - Dynamic visual representations of information entities. Views allow the user means of visualising and working on information entities through visual representations that can represent different aspects of the high dimension space of information, possibly through dimension clustering, classification and reduction.

Knowledge Spaces - User defined systems of information entities with relationships between the entities defined, where the systems each serve to represent information pertaining to different cohesive and coherent domains. Knowledge spaces serve to partition information space.

Perspective Spaces — User defined systems of information entities with relationships between the objects defined, where the systems each serve to represent information pertaining to different perspectives. Perspective spaces introduce a higher dimension of contextual spaces within information and knowledge spaces, allowing entities to be related in different ways without affecting the actual information.

Subsystems

Information Manager - Enables the creation and management of reps

Information Collector - Enables the collection of sets of information based on some criteria

Organisation Structure Manager - Enables the creation and management of infogroups and organisation structures

Metas Manager - Enables the creation and management of metas on information entities

Associations Manager - Enables the creation and management of associations between information entities

Periodicals Manager - Enables the creation and management of periodicals

Views Manager - Enables the creation and management of views Space Manager - Enables the creation and management of information, knowledge and perspective spaces

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

System Overview

A dynamic, multidimensional knowledge clustering, management and representation system for user and system multidimensional structurisation, management, organisation, association, metaisation, formulation, evolution management, contextualisation, searcn, exploration, visualisation and re-representation of information, knowledge and data in multidimensional information space is presented. The system works as an information system through which the user is able to add many levels of dimensions in and above an information space, and at the same time is able to explore, search, view and in other ways work upon the different dimensions and combinations of dimensions of information in the information space. In one embodiment, the system is able to act as an information augmentation platform, where the user by using tools provided can express much more information upon existing information in available domains. In another example, the system is able to act as an information re-representer, where existing user information can be re- represented to express different, and often hidden, aspects of the information. In another example, the system is able to act as a common information management platform, where the user is able to consolidate different types of information required for a project or task from a multiplicity of sources into one common place, where this information can be structured and accessed coherently with high relevancy. The possible uses of this system are possibly manifold. The system is able to work upon information existing within the computer environment, such as documents, parts of documents, emails, etc; it also able to work upon information existing outside the computer environment, such as online web information, streaming media, information from other computer environments and so on; it is also able to work upon information inputted into the system possibly by the user or other systems, such as annotations, sketches, drawings, etc; It is also able to work upon information derived from information from any of the above information sources, such as reports and statistics. Through this system, information from diverse sources can be structurised, managed, organised, associated, meta, contextualised, searched, explored, visualised and re-represented from a single platform which operates and represents information in multidimensional information space.

System Structure

Structurally, the system is made up of three layers: A storage layer, an operations layer, and a representation layer. The storage layer consists of subsystems that store information inputted into or created by the system, while the operations layer contains subsystems that operate upon and process information located within or outside of the system, while the representation layer consists of subsystems that presents information or results of operations and allow the user to manipulate information through means of controlling the information operations subsystems. Variants of this basic structure are possible. For example, other possible extensions of this system would be server or network based variants, systems with external database, etc.

Information Space

At the fundamental level, the system can operate on representations of information within a multidimensional information space, or on the information directly. The information space can be seen as the information cloud that the system is directly or indirectly linked to and has access and/or influence over, where different dimensions of information can exist above the information entities existing in the information space. These information entities are created, managed and acted upon by the system and user. As more information entities are added, the information structure evolves. Collecting Information into Information Spaces

The system works on information, which can be inputted by the user, collected by the system automatically, or collected by the system based on some user directions. To enable information collection by the system, the system has an information collector, which collects information from information sources both internal and/or external to the system. This allows the user or system to proactively gather sets of information based on some criteria. These sets of information can be represented in the information space. More particularly, the information collector is able to pull information from internal systems, and also external systems, possibly directly or indirectly through other systems or other forms of proxies. The collector can possibly work based on the concept of a meta search engine, which can both build an index of information or at the same time rely on their search engines to perform search and clustering operations. When information is inputted or collected into the system, the system will update the information space and hence update the information structure.

Working with Information in Information Space via Reps and other Information Entities

When the system is provided with a piece of information, possible inputted into the system or collected from external information sources by the system, the system will automatically create a rep corresponding to the information. Reps are representations of information brought into the information space. The system can then perform operations via the rep that references the information respectively rather than directly on the information. By doing so, reps encapsulate the details of the information, thereby enabling the system to work on and represent all information regardless of lower level details of the data such as type, location, granularity, life time, editability and so on. An information manager subsystem interprets the different types of information that the reps represent and thus create and manage the corresponding reps.

The system introduces a wide range of information entities beyond reps that enables the user to further manipulate the information structure. In particular, infogroups, organisation structures, metas, associations, periodicals, views, knowledge spaces and perspective spaces are introduced. We will explore briefly the capabilities brought about by each of the information entities.

In the area of information organisation, the system provides organisation structures and in particular infogroups. Infogroups are a type of organisation structure which simply allows the grouping of related or unrelated information, particularly reps and organisation structures recursively. Infogroups can be manually created by the user, or automatically generated by the system based on some criteria. Organisation structures in general allow information to be organised via different structures, such as hierarchies, ontological structures, graphs, lists, tables and so on.

In the area of information augmentation, the system provides metas and associations. Metas allow additional information to be added upon information entities which describe the information entity above their basic content and meaning. Examples of metas may include the authors of files, user added comments, short descriptions of documents and encoding details of videos. Associations allow relationships between information entities to be created. For example, the associator allows an email in the system to be associated with a note in a text document, or a contact of a person to be associated with a link to a website, or groups of reps to be associated together to form a project.

In the area of information evolution management, the system provides periodicals. Periodicals are the evolution of information entities over time. Periodicals provide various functions, such as the ability to review past versions of information, to revert to past versions of information, and also to create important captures, which saves the state of the information at the point in time, over the period of evolution of the information. Periodicals introduce the important aspect of time into the information space.

In the area of information visualisation, the system provides views. Views are the dynamic visual representations of information entities. Views allow the user means of visualising and working on information entities through visual representations that can represent different aspects of the high dimension space of information, possibly through dimension clustering, classification and reduction.

In the area of information spaces, the system provides perspective spaces and knowledge spaces. Knowledge spaces serve to represent information pertaining to different cohesive and coherent domains creating possibly overlapping partitions in the information space. Perspective spaces serve to represent information pertaining to different perspectives. Perspective spaces introduce a higher dimension of contextual spaces within information and knowledge spaces, which allows entities to be related in different ways without affecting the actual information.

Directing the System through Information Tools and Processes

The system provides tools which enable the access, use and manipulation of information within the system, outside but referenced to by the system, and outside the system. These tools include managers for the various information entities, such as but not limited to the organisation structures manager, spaces manager, metas manager, associations manager, periodicals manager, views manager. These tools act on information located within information space. In one aspect, the system makes use of combinations of these tools internally to carry out its operations. In another aspect, the user is able to use these tools to operate directly on information. Apart from operating on information, there are auxiliary tools available which allows the user to specify how the system operates on the available information.

We will explore all above mentioned aspects of the system in more detail in the sections to follow.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Figure 100: Computer Environments Figure 200: System Concept

Figure 300: A Possible System Embodiment

Figure 400: System Structure

Figure 500: Information Space

Figure 600: Collecting Information into Information Spaces Figure 700: Working with Information in Information Space via Reps and Other Information Entities

Figure 800: Reps and Information Manager

Figure 900: Working with Reps

Figure 1000: Infogroups, Organisation Structures and Organisation Structures Manager Figure 1100: Working With Infogroups and Organisation Structures

Figure 1200: Meta and Metas Manager

Figure 1300: Working With Metas

Figure 1400: Associations and Associations Manager

Figure 1500: Working With Associations Figure 1600: Periodicals and Periodicals Manager

Figure 1700: Working With Periodicals

Figure 1800: Views and Views Manager

Figure 1900: Working with Views

Figure 2000: Knowledge Spaces, Perspective Spaces and Spaces Manager Figure 2100: Working With Knowledge Spaces and Perspective Spaces

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

Contents

Introduction

Computer Environments - System Concept System Structure Information Space

Collecting Information into Information Space Working with Information in Information Space o Reps and Information Manager o Infogroups, Organisation Structures and Organisation Structures Manager o Metas and Metas Manager o Associations and Associations Manager o Periodicals and Periodicals Manager o Views and Views Manager o Knowledge Spaces, Perspective Spaces and Spaces Manager Information and Support Tools o Managers o Search Tool o Demarcation Tool o Filtering Tool o Compare Tool Case Study of Possible Embodiments o Case Study of a Server/Client Knowledge Management System o Case Study of a Project Workspace Application

Conclusion

Introduction

The present invention relates to a dynamic, multidimensional knowledge clustering, management and representation system for the user and system structurisation, management, organisation, association, metaisation, formulation, evolution management, contextualisation, search, exploration, visualisation and re- representation of information, knowledge and data in multidimensional information space. The following description is presented to enable one of skill in the art to make and use the invention and is provided in the context of a patent application and its requirements. Various modifications to the preferred embodiment will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art and the generic principles herein may be applied to other embodiments. Thus, the present invention is not intended to be limited to the embodiment shown but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and features described herein. A system in accordance with the present invention would typically be utilised in information or information related systems. It will be appreciated however that the present invention is not limited to applications discussed in this section but also other areas in information science.

Computer Environments (Figure 100) A system and method in accordance with the present invention would typically be utilised in a computer system. Figure 100 is a block diagram illustrating a conventional computer system, which serves as one type of operating environment for the present invention. The computer system includes a display, a keyboard, a pointing device, a storage medium, a processor, and a memory. The processor operates in conjunction with the memory, which are all connected by a bus. The processor operates in conjunction with the memory to operate on information or data in the storage medium, or from a network. One skilled in the art should also recognise that the present invention could be utilised in a variety of data processing systems and its use would be within the spirit and scope of the present invention. For example, the present invention could be implemented by a server providing information operations capabilities and a client could provide the resultant display. In another example, the present invention could be implemented in a peer to peer information communications and operations system where information could be shared and operated upon. In particular, the system operates upon information - within the computer environment, such as documents, parts of documents, emails, etc; outside the computer environment, such as online web information, streaming media, information from other computer environments and so on; inputted into the system possibly by the user or other systems, such as annotations, sketches, drawings, etc; derived from information from any of the above information sources, such as reports and statistics.

System Concept (Figures 200, 300)

The system works as an information system through which the user is able to add many levels of dimensions in and above an information space, and at the same time is able to explore, search, view and in other ways work upon the different dimensions and combinations of dimensions of information in the information space.

The system is able to work upon information existing within the computer environment, such as documents, parts of documents, emails, etc; it also able to work upon information existing outside the computer environment, such as online web information, streaming media, information from other computer environments and so on; it is also able to work upon information inputted into the system possibly by the user or other systems, such as annotations, sketches, drawings, etc; It is also able to work upon information derived from information from any of the above information sources, such as reports and statistics. Through this system, information from diverse sources can be structurised, managed, organised, associated, meta, contextualised, searched, explored, visualised and re-represented from a single platform.

By utilising the concept of information spaces and information entities, which enables the system to create an environment where information spaces can be combined with a whole range of other concepts, the user is able to use many different metaphors to operate on information. These metaphors open up new possibilities for the ways the user can utilise and interact with the information environment, thus solving many problems users face when dealing with information in existing information systems, such as information overload, inability to easily correlate information, limitations due to information locality, inability to flexibly organise information within strict hierarchies, inability to express user ideas on any unit of information. Strategic and flexible combinations of these metaphors when implemented in various embodiments of the present invention can thus enable users to operate on information within computer systems as if a natural extension of their ideas, rather than separate information stores.

In a possible embodiment of the invention, a system allows information to be searched multi-dimensionally and clustered by means of association, augmentation of user ideas and comments using information entities, or by user or system generated grouping. A well structured, multi-layer, interactive and informative user interface then re-presents the information in the information space in possibly a myriad of different forms, which in totality forms a multidimensional contextual and perspectival representation of knowledge. Users will then be able to access relevant information in clusters of information quickly through refining of the relevant knowledge. Every cluster of information can be presented via multiple facet dimensions, allowing the user to have multidimensional views of information and their correlation, possibly deriving good knowledge. There are few ways in which users can explore knowledge within this system. In the first, the user is able to use a dynamic multidimensional queries multidimensional enterprise search system to perform faceted search. Alternatively, the user is able to import existing file structures into the system and re-organise them into other structures that the user prefers, without affecting the original structure or meaning. This allows the user to customise the information structure to his preferences and thus enable better understanding and knowledge, facilitating re-use of referencing of the knowledge. In addition, users can also create working project groups where all information, regardless of format or location, for a working project can be made available, moved around, removed, and synthesised without affecting the original information and information structure. In one possible scenario, this facilitates file sharing on a common platform such as a server, allowing each individual user to have their own views on the same information. Many more functions help the user reference and re-use knowledge for work processes will be further discussed.

The present invention changes way people store, retrieve, understand and see their information or knowledge. Users can now create meaning above information, penning down ideas, comments and adding dimensions into or above the information space is now possible. Work processes can thus be more seamless and information is made much more holistic and all rounded. Instead of users trying to work within a previously limited information space, users are now able to work within an extended, multidimensional, augmentable information space which allows for much more expressibility, allowing users to express or work using any form of information or idea above or within any information, knowledge or aspect of the information space.

The following discussion will describe with particularity core concepts of the system, possible embodiments and applications.

System Structure (Figure 400)

We describe the system structure of a possible embodiment of the present invention. Structurally, the system consists of three layers: A storage layer, an operations layer, and a representation layer. The system operates upon an information space. We will examine each of the layers, their relationships and possible implementations.

The storage layer consists of subsystems concerned with the persistency and storage functionalities provided by the system. In an exemplary implementation, this layer might consist of a database, database scripts, object relational mapping tools, an internal or external file or object system, where units of information are referenced using unique identities. The system is designed to be able to store a diverse variety of types of information, thus the storage layer itself is designed to be a layered system possibly similar to internet protocols - it is as generic as possible at the base, with added functions and protocols to introduce structure for information at higher layers. This thus allows the system to store any type of information and at the same time, allow for ease of information interpretation. Types of information the storage layer is expected to handle would include files, contacts, emails, paragraphs of texts, annotations, drawings, images, videos, soundtracks, diagrams and other possible types of data that are allowed as valid inputs for each of the different possible embodiments of the present invention. The storage layer thus plays an important role in the system by abstracting away the details of information storage and persistency, presenting a unified model for information persistency and retrieval irregardless of the structure of the information and the details of the underlying storage systems being utilised. The storage layer is typically acted upon by the operations layer, which will transform the raw information within the storage layer into refined instances of information useful for different contexts.

The operations layer consists of subsystems concerned with the information operations that the system can perform on the information space. Such operations might operate or process information located logically within the system, such as within the storage layer, or information located outside of the system, such as information on a file system or in an online repository being referenced to by information entities within the system. The operations layer may consist of both system and user centric functions. System centric functions are defined as functions used specifically by other areas of the system, where these system centric functions are typically non obvious to the user and act possibly as supporting subsystems within the system. An example of this could be functions that perform automatic interpretation of various possible file compression schemes. User centric functions are defined as functions related directly to user functions, such as functions that allow the user to create relationships between information, or to allow the user to annotate upon information. In one aspect, the user typically invokes user centric functions through subsystems in the representation layer. The operations layer thus plays an important role in the system, with most of the core functions of the system which act upon information are located here.

The representation layer consists of subsystems concerned with the user-system interaction and representation of information. This layer thus consists of functions which handle the interfacing of the system with the user, and it might take into account the details of the underlying hardware and user preferences in order to decide on suitable representations to use. Different representations might be possible even for a single embodiment of the present invention. This allows the user to be able to interact with the system in a way that is most preferred for the underlying information or task. For example, the representation layer might allow the user to choose to render information using different possible organisational views, such as a flow chart, hierarchy or map. The representation layer can work based on different visual metaphors depending on the type of computer environment the system is operating on, such as hand held computer devices or server systems. In one instance, the representation layer might be operating for a user which might be another application program. In this case, the representation might be a protocol based pipe instead of a visual representation of the information. The representation layer thus plays an important role in the system as the main area of the system concerned with the interaction with and representation of information.

Information Space (Figure 500)

The information space is the basis of the system, allowing the integrative synthesis of information with user ideas. It forms the multidimensional, multirepresentational, multiperspectival, multiknowledge associative meta-able layer that integrates the user, information and time. In effect, the information space allows any form of information to be represented within, and at the same time allow a countable but possibly unbounded set of operations to act upon the information. For example, the information space allows the user to input a variety of information, such as files, websites and parts of documents, where the user can express certain concepts such as relationships between the information by using an associater tool, or the user can annotate upon the information to express certain ideas. In one embodiment, the information space might be simply a network of interlinked in-memory objects. In another embodiment, the information space might be a persistent layer utilising a relational database for representation of the various information. In the system, objects existing within information spaces are referred to as information entities. The structure implied by the information entities and their direct or indirect interconnections is defined as the information structure. The information space might exist beyond the application, to encompass all information and relationships accessible by the system.

Collecting Information into Information Space (Figure 600) With the structure of the system and the concept of the information space established, the system needs ways of gathering information into this information space. The information may exist within the system, in external systems, or both. There are three ways information can be made to exist within the system - user inputted, user directed system collected and system collected. User in this context might possibly refer to other computer systems. User inputted information might consist of any forms of direct information inputs such as entered text, RSS feeds, annotations, voice input, video inputs, etc. System collected information is any information automatically collected by the system, of which an illustration follows: the system scans the contents of a document, and needs to fetch other documents referenced to by this document. The documents make up the set of the system collected information. User directed system collected information can be seen in the case of a search for information, where the user enters specific criteria and directs the system to fetch all information satisfying the criteria. In the last two cases, the system needs a subsystem to allow information to be consolidated based on some criteria. This subsystem is aptly named the information collector. The collector is able to pull information from both internal and external systems, possibly directly or indirectly through other systems or other forms of proxies. An embodiment of the information collector is as follows: the information collector is implemented as a meta search engine, which consists of its own crawler, extractor, index, query parser, optimiser, query and relevancy engine, query analyser and optimiser. As a meta search engine, this particular embodiment of the information collector can also post queries to existing search engines or meta search engines both within the local computer environment or indirectly to remote computer environments. The implementation of the meta search engine might also perform consolidation and additional filtering of results before presenting the final results to the system. In one instance, the information collector can possibly perform online indexing of information within the existing information space as information is added or changed. The information collector as mentioned is used not just by the user, but also by the system to perform certain tasks such as automated or directed clustering of information. The information collector thus provides the user and system important means of collecting information of diverse types from possibly a multiplicity of information sources, where the information share certain attributes that satisfy criteria specified via the query to the information collector.

Working with Information in Information Space via Reps and other Information Entities (Figure 700)

When the system is provided with a piece of information, possibly user inputted or system collected, the information has to be represented within the system. The means of representation can vary considerably depending on the nature of the information and the preferences of the user. In one instance, the information can be simply copied into the storage layer of the system. The user can then operate on this local copy of information, with an option to reference back to the original information upon request or certain triggers, such as when the original information is modified. In another instance, the information can be referenced to by the system, with possibly a local cached copy used when the information is unavailable. In another instant, the information might have been entered directly into the system; in this case the storage layer will keep a stream of the actual information. There are other possible means not stated here, which might be created to handle particular streams of information not fitting to the above stated models.

The information manager subsystem manages all these multiplicity of forms of representations of information within the information space and the details involved with mapping the information into the information space. For every piece of information brought into the system, the information manager will automatically create a rep corresponding to the information. The system can then have the option to operate on the information in the information space via the reps that reference the corresponding information rather than directly on the information. Reps encapsulate the details of the information, thereby enabling the system to work on and represent all information regardless of lower level details of the information such as type, location, granularity, life time, editability. Detailed studies of rep are provided in the sections to follow. The information manager marshals all operations performed via reps by the system and the effects on the information represented by the reps.

The concept of reps thus allows the system to represent diverse information within the information space. The system introduces a wide range of information entities which the user is able to create to further develop upon the information structure. These information entities build upon each other to contribute to the richness, dimension and depth of information represented in the information structure. In particular, infogroups, organisation structures, metas, associations, periodicals, views, knowledge spaces and perspective spaces are introduced. We will explore briefly the capabilities brought about by each of the information entities, followed by detail analysis of the capabilities brought about by each of the information entities.

In the area of information organisation, the system provides organisation structures and in particular infogroups. Infogroups are a type of information structure which simply allows the grouping of related or unrelated information, particularly reps and organisation structures recursively. Infogroups can be manually created by the user, or automatically generated by the system based on some criteria. Organisation structures in general allow information to be organised via different structures, such as hierarchies, ontological structures, graphs, lists, tables and so on.

In the area of information evolution management, the system provides periodicals. Periodicals are the evolution of information entities over time. Periodicals provide various functions, such as the ability to review past versions of information, to revert to past versions of information, and also to create important captures, which saves the state of the information at the point in time, over the period of evolution of the information. Periodicals introduce an important aspect of time into the information space.

The individual information entities and subsystems will be studied in more detail in the following sections. Reps and Information Manager (Figures 800, 900)

Within the information space, reps are the representations of any form of information. Reps are created automatically by the information manager subsystem whenever information is brought into the system by the system or by a user. Depending on the implementation of the embodiment of the invention and the nature of the information, many possible manifestations of reps are possible. In one example, a rep representing a website might simply contain a hyperlink to the URL of the website with possible a local cached copy. In another example, a rep representing a paragraph in a document might contain encoding details of the document, a local cache of the paragraph, a link to the actual document and the starting and ending positions that mark the paragraph within the document. The information manager subsystem manages all these multiplicity of forms of representations of information and the details involved with mapping the information into the information space. There are two possible approaches to the implementation of this system. In the first, a protocol can be set up through which applications conforming to this protocol can provide the necessary mappers from information to reps. In the second, the system can provide a plug in host which the mappers can be added into the system as plug-ins by various authors for different information types and sources. The information manager is thus the only information specific portion of the system, and it plays an important role in mapping reps to information.

In one aspect, reps provide the user a means of working on any unit of information or data not limited by constraints of the computer environment. For example, reps can represent a paragraph in a text document, a word or a letter in a note, a part of an image, a section of a website, or even selected rows in a spreadsheet. The user can easily create a rep of any information or group of information that the user is interested in. Reps can represent information through various means not limited to, for example, by pointing or linking to the information, or by containing a representation of the information, or by containing both link and representation of the information. An exemplary use of reps can be seen in the following scenario: the user might find certain information in a document useful, he can create a rep of the information, and the rep can be further operated on. The user can also modify the information to better suit his preferences.

In another aspect, made possible by the bridging role of the information manager, reps present a single unified object interface to all types of information external to the system, and at the same time introduce information operations via this proxy. This allows the system to work on diverse sets of information without the need to understand the details of implementation of the information and the respective systems they originate from. From a data perspective, the system can work on information by working directly on information or by working on reps.

In another aspect, reps may also be information representation of processed data. An example of processed data might be information processed and derived from sets of existing results originating from search services. This aspect of reps is very useful as it allows reps not only to simply represent information, but also represent information that represents information. It is through this ability that reps can also work on the results generated by the information collector subsystem. In one example, the user might have performed a search on "Apples^"' on a set of documents within the file system. Invoked by the system, the information collector will thus return documents that satisfy the "Apples" criteria, such as by containing the keyword within the contents or properties of the documents. This set of documents can be represented by a single rep, which the user can further operate upon such as commenting via annotations or relating the set of documents to another piece of information. Upon accessing the various individual documents in the set of documents, further reps can be created for the individual document by the system so that they can be individually operated upon. This ability of reps to represent processed data is thus useful in many contexts.

In another aspect, not only are reps able to represent any form of information, they can through various implementations represent the information in any form. For example, with a webpage as the source of information for a rep, the rep can potentially represent the webpage as a link, summary, xml data, full text, bag of words and more. This ability of reps to represent information using any form is crucial to the flexibility of the system for purposes of information transformation. In one embodiment, this can be possibly implemented through a set of functions where the user or system can choose the representation format of the rep, and the proper information transformation process can be carried out by the function. Data transformation tools and protocols do exist; the system can leverage on these to implement the data transformation and representation capabilities of reps.

In another aspect, reps can be system defined, user defined or both. System defined reps can be seen in examples where the information collector returns reps of the information found. User defined reps can be seen in examples where the user explicitly initiates the creation of a new rep and links it to an existing or new information. An existing rep can be system defined then edited by the user, or user defined then delegated back to the system for automatic tracking and management. Implementations of reps thus contain various attributes specifying different levels of involvement of the system and the user on the behaviour of the reps.

In another aspect, attributes on reps can be set to inform the information manager that any changes to the information the rep represents are to be tracked, which then proper action can be taken. On the other hand, this tracking can be disabled for certain reps which the user wants to archive and want no more changes performed on it. The ability to trigger some process or function upon some event of the represented information contributes greatly to the dynamics of the system. This tracking behaviour can be implemented in the information manager through possibly connecters to watchers or tracking protocols provided by various information stores, or if these are not present, custom periodic watchers that look out for changes at predefined intervals or upon certain user actions can be created.

In another aspect, when the information the rep represents may have been updated, remove or in other ways changed, the user has the option to update the rep with the modified information, or to have the rep remain at the original representation of the unmodified information. For example, when a document on the file system that a rep represents is modified or removed, the rep can be updated to re-represent the modified or removed information, or the rep can remain linked to the original input by possibly storing a copy of the original input before modification or removal, after which a new rep may be created to represent the modified input. In another aspect, when the information entities may have changed, the user has the option to update the information with the modified data, or to create a new copy of the modified data. For example, when a rep that represents a document on the file system has been modified, the document can be updated to reflect the changes, or another copy of the document can be created with the modifications linking to the new rep. Reps also allow users to operate on or within information spaces in order to derive knowledge without changing or affecting the actual information. This is useful as the user might simply want to manipulate the information in order to explore understand different aspects of it and its relation to other pieces of information without any intention to change the information. This capability can be implemented in the system using a variety of ways, one of which would be to store and represent all changes made by the user within the rep instead of changing the actual information. In one example, the user might have brought in a webpage into the information space, represented by a rep. Although in usual cases web pages cannot be changed by users, through reps the webpage can be changed, annotated, edited and otherwise customised by the user to suit certain purposes. In this case, the actual webpage is not changed; the changes are all stored within the rep possibly through the information manager, which applies it on a rendered copy of the webpage. In some cases, the user can choose to apply changes made on the rep onto the actual information permanently.

In another aspect, multiple reps to the same information can be created. In this case, the reps may be different representations of the same information. For example, three different reps may point to the same information, but the user can modify or represent each rep differently to display different aspects of the same information. This capability of multiple reps is thus useful especially for representing or organising information differently in different contexts.

In another aspect, reps can also store copies of information locally within the system or remotely in some storage network when needed, such as when the information the rep references is removed, a copy of the information can be contained within the rep possibly through the information manager to ensure the continuity and consistency of the system. In one example, three reps may point to the same information. When the user modifies the information represented by one of the reps, the information represented by all three reps will be modified. However, if this is not the intended result, a copy of the information can be created and modified so that the modified rep points to the new copy of the information, while the others sill point to the original information. In another example, the user can set a rep to automatically archive the latest copy of the information it represents in the event that the information is deleted or changed.

In summary, the system is able to work directly on information; however, with the introduction of reps, a new dimension is created above the information which allows for much more flexible information representation, manipulation, associations and other user desired information operations.

Infogroups, Organisation Structures and Organiser (Figures 1000, 1100)

At times, users want to be able to group related or unrelated information so that the information can be accessed together. Building further on grouping, users may want to be able to organise information collectively via organisation structures so that the information can be accessed easily. Information that is well organised is easier to access and work upon. The system thus provides the various forms of organisation structures to structure information in the information space. The system has a subsystem, the organiser, which enables both user and system the creation and management of all forms of organisation structures within the system. Of all organisation structures, the most basic is the infogroup, which provides generic grouping facilities for reps and other organisation structures. Organisation structures are applicable but not limited to reps and organisation structures, including infogroups, within the information space. We will explore infogroups, followed by other information structures, in detail.

Infogroups provide the capability to group related or unrelated information together. In an embodiment of the present invention, infogroups are collections of reps and infogroups recursively. Infogroups can be implemented in various ways depending on the embodiments. One possible implementation of infogroups could be a list of items referencing existing reps or infogroups. Various adornments to the basic list are possible, such as possible additional information for each entry that is relevant to the embodiment.

In one aspect, infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms to make them coherent to each other. The information can possibly exist across various information sources and hence natively cannot be easily grouped together. Through the use of reps, the system is able to represent within a single information space all information regardless of the details of the information such as location, granularity and type. Infogroups existing within the information space thus build upon this property of reps, to allow any form of information to be grouped together. For example, a user might be working on a project that uses various sources of information such as emails, files, websites and quotations from various documents. Infogroups allow the user to easily group all this information together into one convenient place for easy access. Furthermore, infogroups can be operated upon by other aspects of the system. For example, the user can simply search within an infogroup, leading to results relevant to the context of the infogroup.

In another aspect, infogroups can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both. User defined infogroups are simply created through the organiser, and users can manually place reps and infogroups which they want to correlate via groupings into the infogroups. System defined infogroups are automatically created by the system in response to some event, such as an invocation from another part of the system to automatically create clusters from a set of information. Furthermore, system defined infogroups can automatically fetch items into the infogroups based on some specified query. For example, the organiser can cause a system defined infogroup to be created such that it automatically fetches music files from the computer environment using the information collector and the resulting information are grouped together. The user can then choose to further edit the contents of the infogroup, so that although the infogroup is system defined, it can be customised to suit the user's preferences. An implementation of the system defined infogroup may contain additional properties to store details such as the query used in fetching the information.

In another aspect, information can exist across a number of different groups. For example, the user may be categorising a certain piece of information. This information might be suitably placed in various categories. By creating different infogroups for each category, the user can place the rep corresponding to the information in different infogroups. As infogroups do not locally store the rep but rather reference the rep, multiple infogroups can point to the same rep, leading to the intended results of the same rep existing across multiple infogroups. This aspect of infogroups thus allows users more flexibility in information organisation as compared to systems such as strict hierarchies.

Having explored infogroups, the system extends the basic infogroup to other organisation structures that provide higher levels of structuring of information. Examples of these organisation structures can include hierarchies, ontological structures, graphs, lists, tables and other possible structures. A multitude of different information structures are provided as they have varying efficacies depending on user requirements, nature of information and use of the information. Organisation structures can be implemented in various ways depending on the embodiments and the different types of organisation structures. One possible implementation might follow usual computational data structures, where the details of the structure and information can be persisted into or retrieved from the storage layer of the system.

In one aspect, being extended upon infogroups, organisation structures inherit the various aspects of infogroups. These aspects include the ability to group together information to make them coherent to each other, the ability for information to exist across various organisation structures, and the ability of the organisation structures to be user defined, system defined or both. This aspect is apparent if one considers organisation structures to be groups, or collection of groups, that introduce further structure into the sets of information as compared to that possible by groups. Elaborating on system defined organisation structures, an organisation structure can be automatically populated by the organiser through the use of the information collector with reps and groups based on some criteria, query or other forms of direction specified by the system or the user. For example, the user can choose a set of existing documents representing invoices, and activate a function of the system to automatically organise the information into a hierarchical organisation structure based on the company whom the invoice originates from. The above example would obviously need some form of document understanding or extraction if it is to be fully automated, however, it can be easily done if metas have been applied to the documents stating the company.

In another aspect, the set of organisation structures provided by the system is an expandable set of implementations. By default, the system can provide basic organisation structures such as hierarchies, ontological structures, graphs, lists, tables and infogroups. However, more organisation structures can be added to the system simply by creating implementations that satisfy the organisation structure interface, and these organisation structures can be used to further organise information in other ways.

In another aspect, the organiser can import external structures outside of the system as organisation structures. For example, a web directory represented by a website, its pages and links between pages can be imported, and an ontological structure with reps and groups can be used to re-represent the web directory in the system. A folder from a file folder system can be imported into the system and converted into an infogroup. These organisation structures can be further worked upon by the user. In another aspect, the organisation structures can be exported to external structures outside of the system. For example, a hierarchical organisation structure of information within the system can be exported to a hierarchy of information described by a extensible mark-up language in a file, or to possibly a folder hierarchy on a file folder system on a network, or possibly to tables describing the hierarchical relations using a relational structure within a relational database. However, while any information of any form can be brought into the system easily, the exporting of organisational structures to external systems may be limited by the support provided by the external system. For example, an hierarchical organisation structure containing reps to files where certain reps may exist across multiple portions of the hierarchy may not be easily exported to a hierarchical directory system supporting only strict hierarchies. Nevertheless, the exporting function when used in certain scenarios by the user or system can be very useful, especially for purposes of archiving or sharing or certain organised information.

In another aspect, attributes on organisation structures can be set to inform the organisation structure manager that any changes to certain external or internal organisation structures are to be tracked, which then certain actions can be performed on the organisation structure. This behaviour is analogous to the tracking behaviour for reps, but in this case it works on organisation structures instead. An instance where tracking can possibly be used is to synchronise organisation structures that were originally imported with the external structures where they were imported from. An example would be a hierarchical organisation structure in the information space can be synced in structure with the structure of a hierarchical structure in a file folder system. The ability to trigger some process or function upon some event of an external structure or information contributes greatly to the dynamics of the system, this tracking behaviour can be implemented in the organisation structure manager through possibly connecters to watches or tracking protocols provided by various information stores, or if these are not present, custom periodic watches that look out for changes at predefined intervals or upon certain user actions can be created.

In another aspect, for an organisation structure that is set to be linked with another external or internal organisation structure, when the linked organisation structure may have been updated, remove or in other ways changed, the user has the option to update the organisation structure with the changes made in the linked structure, or to have the organisation structure remain unchanged. For example, given two hierarchical structures where one is an organisation structure and the other is a file-folder hierarchy on an external file system, when the file-folder hierarchy changes structure the organisation structure can be automatically updated to reflect the new structure, or it can remain unchanged.

In another aspect, for an organisation structure that is set to be linked with another external or internal organisation structure, when the organisation structure may have been updated or changed in other ways by the user or system, the linked external or internal organisation structure can be updated or remain unchanged. For example, given an ontological organisation structure that reflects the hyper linking of a linked web site, when the ontological organisation structure is changed it the website can be updated with a new hyper linking scheme. In this example, this has to be implemented possibly through plug ins for the system that allows it to carry out the above, by mapping of ontological structures to web sites, and also for the operations needed to change the hyper linking scheme.

In another aspect, organisation structures allow users to organise information semantically for user tasks. It is common for users to use information from diverse locations to perform tasks, make decisions, or in general use the information as supporting data for some work. By enabling the user to organise this information collectively, the user can operate on the information in a much more organised, effective and efficient manner, possibly without affecting the actual information but with the option to update the information when there are modifications. For example, the user may need to reference information from websites, documents, emails, multimedia, and other information from diverse locations for a task he is working on. This information can be organised collectively into a single organisation structure which the user can work from. The user can choose to remove this organisation structure after usage without affecting the actual information.

In another aspect, organisation structures allow users to explore or organise information in different ways, which allows the user to explore information through different dimensions and aspects. In one example, a same set of video files can be organised using different hierarchical structures that reflect different attributes of the videos. In one instant, videos can be organised by genre, followed by producer and date of production. In another instant, videos can be organised by genre, followed by rating followed sorted by title of video. This is made possible through the use of different organisation structures. The organisation structures can be user populated, or system populated based on some criteria and properties of the information that the system understands, such as, in the above example, attributes such as genre, rating, title, producer and data of production can most likely be found as meta data corresponding to the video files.

In another aspect, information in same locality within organisation structures a piece of information is located in can be made known upon activation of the later information. This allows the user to easily understand the various contexts that the information resides in, which can possibly be derived from the information brought about by the other information around it in the same organisation structures. This is especially true in the case of infogroups, as information in infogroup have some relationship with each other.

In summary, infogroups and other organisation structures introduce another dimension above reps, by allowing the user to have collections of reps and other organisation structures which are of direct or indirect coherence, thus assisting the user in areas such as search, exploration, and understanding of information, and thus possibly lead to formulation of new information.

Metas and Metas Manager (Figures 1200, 1300)

While working with information, users often want to express additional information about the existing data or information. Metas provide this capability. By providing additional information about information entities in the system, metas describe the information entity above their basic content and meaning. One possible implementation of metas could be an information entity with a reference to the information and a field-value pair describing some aspect of the information. Metas are applicable but not limited to reps, organisation structures, periodicals, associations and views in the information space.

In one aspect, meta can be applied on any information, such as the contents of documents, files, pictures, hyperlinks and other information entities. This is possible as metas is able to be applied on any information entity within the information space. In the event that certain meta cannot be applied directly on a piece of information, the meta can be indirectly applied by the creation of a rep by the information manager, followed by applying the meta on the rep instead of directly on the actual information.

In another aspect, metas can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both. User defined metas can be in many forms including user comments, annotations and other user defined descriptions of information. System specified or generated metas may include the authors of files, short descriptions of documents and encoding details of videos. Users can also choose to modify system defined metas to make them more relevant to the user preferences.

In another aspect, metas are dependent on the information they describe. If the information the meta describe cease to exist, the metas related to it will be removed accordingly. This behaviour is enforced by the meta manager to prevent floating metas with no parent, which can results in false results when certain operations, such as search and exploration, are performed.

In another aspect, one user specific form of metas would be annotations. Annotations allow the user to easily pen down any notes or ideas on any information as the user uses, navigates, searches or explores the information, so as to better describe the information, for example, facilitate search in the future or to remind the user the context of the information. One possible way of implementing this would be through the use of overlays and handwriting input, which is supported in certain application programming interfaces. Annotations allow a richer form of meta information expression as compared to simple text based meta, as its capabilities extend beyond text into handwriting, diagrams or even voice that the user can tag along on specific parts of information that support the particular forms of annotations.

Through the use of metas, the system allows users to express additional information related to the information entities in the system. This information can be used to facilitate search, exploration of the information, classification of information and in general let both system and user understand more about the data.

Associations and Associations Manager (Figures 1400, 1500) While working with information, users may sometimes want to associate different information to each other to express some relationship. Users may want to relate information to each other, so that when a piece of information is selected, the user can know about the other related information. The system thus has an associater, which provides this capability through the creation and management of associations between information entities. One possible implementation of associations could be an information entity with a list of references to information involved in the relationship, and an attribute stating the type of relationship the association specifies. Associations are applicable but not limited to reps, organisation structures, periodicals, metas and views in the information space.

In one aspect, by providing the ability to define relationships between information entities, associations allow inter-information entities information, such as how information entities relate to each other, to be expressed or created. For example, the associater allows an email in the system to be associated with a note in a text document, or a contact of a person to be associated with a link to a website, or groups of reps to be associated together to form a project. This additional information brings another dimension into the information space.

In another aspect, associations can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both. User defined associations can be of many forms, one example would be a simply association of two files by the user to make them related so that they can be retrieved together. System defined associations can be automatically created by the system. For example, the system may associate information entities with similar attributes together with a rep expressing a common theme, possibly by associating items collected by the information collector. By creating associations between information automatically by the system where possible, users can possibly discover, work on, search and explore information in the information space based on the discovered relationships. Users can also modify system defined associations to improve the relationship.

In another aspect, associations can be strongly or weakly typed. Weakly typed associations typically have only simple labels to describe the type of association. Strongly typed associations can have additional attributes to describe the state of the relationship. Examples of weakly typed associations are apparent throughout the information space, and they can be found whenever two or more information entities are simply associated with each other with no further details provided. Strongly typed associations on the other hand are less used but may provide more expressive power for describing the relationship, an example would be a conditional relationship where an item is related to another item only if certain conditions are met.

In another aspect, associations can contain two or more references to information that are involved in the relationship. The most basic of associations would be relationships with two information entities involved, referred to as binary associations. Examples of such associations would include a document associated with a piece of note, or an address associated with the name of a person. Associations can have more than two references, referred to as multiway associations. An example would be a relationship connecting a single webpage file with all associated supporting files that provide the contents for the webpage file. In some instances, multiway associations can be converted into a multiplicity of binary associations. However this might lead to a large collection of binary associations as a side effect. Another problem with converting single multiway associations into a collection of multiway associations would be that the obvious relationship between the information would be lost.

In another aspect, associations can be unidirectional or bidirectional. Associations which are unidirectional are true only in one way, while associations which are bidirectional make sense both ways. An example of a unidirectional association would a "references" association from a journal A to referenced journal B - the relationship is true only from journal A to journal B and not vice versa. An example of a bidirectional relationship would be a "is related to" association, which is simply a relationship which states that the information involved are generally related without specific details. One possible implementation of directions in associations would be to implement a list of references to information, where each reference has an attribute stating the direction of the relationship.

In another aspect, multiple associations can operate on same or different sets of information. This is because each piece of information has a one to many associations relationship within the information space. In effect, this allows many possible configurations of associations and information, such as but not limited to one or more associations existing between two information entities, one information entity being related to one or more other information entities, an information entity being related to itself recursively.

In another aspect, the information entities associated to an information entity can be made known to the user when it is activated upon. This allows the user to know which information entities are related and how they are related to the activated information entities. These associated information entities thus form an information group. This can be implemented through a progressive association revelation system, where associated information for an information entity can be progressively revelled based on the link distance of association from the information entity, possibly controlled by a visual representation that the user can manipulate. Filters can be applied to selectively show only associations the user specifies. This allows the user to see only associated information that are relevant to the user currently for a specific task or search. This feature can possible be implemented through a breadth first search algorithm, or a simple filtering algorithm based on all retrieved associated information.

Through the ability to create relationships via associations, the system allows the user to create and manage relationship information that lies across sets of information, bringing another dimension above the information. This information can be used to facilitate search, exploration of the information, classification of information and in general let both system and user understand more about the information and how the different information relate to each other, and thus possibly leading to formulation of new information.

Periodicals and Periodicals Manager (Figures 1600, 1700)

Information evolves over time with changing contexts and user needs. There are moments when users want to view or roll back to previous versions of information, or maintain information at a particular version. Periodicals are the evolution of information entities over time. Periodicals are created and managed by the periodicals manager. A basic implementation of periodicals can be a linked list of changes performed on an information entity, which a pointer can move along the list to change the state of the information entity with time. As changes can possibly require large amounts of storage for certain information, certain methods are implemented to deal with the space issue, which we will discuss. Periodicals are applicable but not limited to reps, organisation structures, metas, associations and views in the information space. In one aspect, periodicals can be configured to keep track of both changes to intrinsic aspects of the information, such as its content, and extrinsic aspects of the information, such as change in relationships or metas. This is important as the complete state of information depends on both intrinsic content and the meaning brought about by its metas on it and the relationships it has with other information. The level to which extrinsic changes causes a change in the evolution can be configured based on the implementation of possible embodiments. For example, the system may choose only to track relationships directly involving the information entity.

In one aspect, periodicals can be continuous. Continuous periodicals capture every possible change on an information entity, so that users or the system can revert or view any point state in time. Continuous periodicals have an advantage that the full state of information with dimension of time is captured. However, continuous periodicals are only suitable for certain information where every change can be recorded using relatively small amount of memory. Continuous periodicals are thus possibly used for only very important information where it is important to capture every state.

In another aspect, periodicals can be discrete. Discrete periodicals work on the concept of snapshots, where certain important states in time are captured and stored. Discrete periodicals do not allow the user to review every possible state of the information in time, but only selected important moments. Snapshots can capture the entire state or only changes, whichever is more preferred in the embodiment based on considerations such as time needed to retrieve a state or space needed to store an entire state or only its progressive changes. Meta can be added on snapshots to indicate versions or other information.

In another aspect, users can review and revert to versions of information along its entire evolution. These versions may be continuous or discrete based on the type of periodicals. A possible visual representation for reviewing of versions might be a visual timeline which possibly shows previews representing the state of the information along the timeline. The user can then possibly drag a scroll thumb on the timeline to review the different versions of the information. The review may possibly show changes intrinsic to the information, and may also via other views show extrinsic changes such as changes in relationships and metas. As a result, even when a user has committed certain changes to a piece of information, the user can easily roll back the changes.

In another aspect, users can demarcate certain important versions of the information along its evolution. Through this capability, the user can instantly keep track of versions that are important candidates for review in a future point in time without having to view the entire periodical of an information entity. These demarcated versions may also signify that important content exist within. For example, before a user removes certain content in a document he may demarcate the version of document, so that he can easily review the version in future if he deems the content to be important for some task. The information collector can also make use of demarcations of the information, to allow the user to easily search within demarcated information to find certain content. Through the ability to track the evolution of the intormation entities over time, the system through the use of periodicals allows the user to manage and use information with the added dimension of time and context. In the system, periodicals are managed by the periodicals manager, which is able to track changes of the information entities with time and update the periodicals accordingly possibly through the information manager.

Views and Views Manager (Figures 1800, 1900)

Users need to be able to view information, the different aspects of information, different representations of information, in a myriad of different ways. Information in the system may not appear apparently bound to the user, and may consist of many orders of dimensions. For example, a single information entity within the system such as a rep may belong in multiple groups, organisation structures, associated to a myriad of other information entities, contain different sets of metas based on the perspectives it belongs in, represent different information based on the current status of the periodical it is associated with. Without concrete and yet multidimensional ways of visualising and working on this cloud of information, the user will not be able to comprehend this high dimension space. The system thus provides views, which are visual information entities that enable the dynamic visual representations of information entities. Views are applicable but not limited to reps, organisation structures, metas, associations, periodicals, knowledge spaces, perspective spaces and information spaces.

In one aspect, views allow for visualisation of the different types of information entities, such as groups, reps, metas and associations, to allow the user to understand the information intrinsic and extrinsic to the information entities. For example, the contents represented by a rep can be shown, along with associated metas, infogroups it is in and information entities it is associated with, possibly in a view that allows the user to toggle on or off the different dimension the user wishes to see.

In another aspect, the views can work at multiple levels of details. For example, views can show summaries of documents, the details of the contents of documents, or the details of reps that represent paragraphs in documents, including the metas and associations. In one embodiment, the user might be able to select between levels of details through possible the use of a scrollbar specifying the level of details in discrete steps or a continuous spectrum.

In another aspect, multiple views can be displayed at the same time, where the views can show different dimensions of the same information entity, or showing non-related information entities in the locality. This allows the user to have a multi-faceted view of the information, allowing the user to better correlate and understand the information. For example, when viewing a document, the user can see other dimensions of the document such as its metas, relationships, and possibly titles of documents that exists in the same group as the document.

In another aspect, the views can show different representations of the same information. For example, a set of results returned by the searcher can be represented visually as a list of items with only short descriptions, or the same set of results can be visually represented with thumbnails. This allows effective browsing of a set of information. In another example, if the titles of a list of documents do not reflect well the content of the documents, the user can easily switch to a different representation showing possibly summaries of the documents. Different predefined types of views might be provided by the system in which the user can choose from. This set of predefined views can possibly be expanded upon.

In another aspect, views can show the results of system processes and tools acting on a set of information entities. For example, views can show the results of comparing two information entities, such as reps of two files, in the information space.

In another aspect, users can demarcate and highlight on information entities or collections of information entities in views. For example, users can easily demarcate files represented in a view which they deem important. These demarcations, which can possibly be with the item or above the item, can be used by the information collector for consideration in ranking.

In another aspect, views can highlight multiple appearances of the same information entity. This is useful as users can easily discern by selecting a single information entity, where this information entity also appears in within the view. For example, given a view displaying the contents of a hierarchical organisation structure allowing items in more than one branch, when an item is selected its other locations within the organisation structure can be made known to the user.

In another aspect, the system can rapidly switch between different views of information entities. This is implemented through the concept of the activated information entity, where the currently activated information entity of the system, will be distinguished against other non activated information entities in a view. As the selection changes, the system can quickly toggle between different views to show the user the most relevant information in context. This allows the user to fluidly browse through information.

In another aspect, the user can manipulate and edit the information entities through views. For example, users can create associations, metas and annotations on information entities represented in views.

Through views, the user is able to visualise and work on information entities in the system in a much more fluid manner, as contrasted to traditional viewing of information by opening of, for example, files on a file system individually. Views are thus an important aspect of the system, allowing information to be rendered visually in a myriad of ways and its meaning brought across to the user effectively, and at the same time enabling uses to work on information entities represented by the views.

Knowledge Spaces, Perspective Spaces and Spaces Manager (Figures 2000, 2100)

Based on different contexts and domains, different systems of knowledge, made up of different collections and connections of information entities, can exist. The system thus provides knowledge and perspective spaces, which create spaces above the information space. The functionality of knowledge and perspective spaces are largely similar - both allow users to create user defined spaces, which users can create and work on information entities without affecting other spaces. Their differences are largely semantic - knowledge spaces partition information spaces into different areas of knowledge, while perspective spaces define additional dimensions in information spaces or knowledge spaces based on user perspectives.

In one aspect, knowledge spaces can create entire systems of knowledge for specific domains or tasks. Systems of knowledge in the system are made up of ontologies of information entities including information, reps, infogroups, organisation structures, metas, associations, periodicals and views that represent knowledge in specific domains. Knowledge spaces allow these collections of information to be concretely grouped together into cohesive and coherent wholes.

In one aspect, perspective spaces can represent different perspectives of knowledge without affecting the original information entities. This allows users to manipulate and augment information entities in a perspective without affecting the information entities and without changing the initial context in the knowledge space. For example, the user may create a new perspective for a specific task. Three reps representing files can be brought into the perspective. The user can then work on the three reps, such as by adding annotations and associations relevant to the files in the context of the specific task. These new information are stored only in this perspective and not on the actual reps. Thus, when the user switches to another perspective regarding the three reps, the entire set of annotations and associations are switched to the new set of information represented in the new perspective. In this aspect, the user can thus actively shuffle between different perspectives for access to different systems of knowledge. Users have the option to apply selected information that exist only in a perspective directly onto existing information entities if the selected information is deemed relevant to exist across all perspectives.

In another aspect, knowledge and perspective spaces can be actively reused, expanded, evolved and shared, leading to formulation of new knowledge. In one example, the user may create a new perspective that works upon the information that exists in two pre-existing perspectives. New information and useful correlations can be derived from information found in the two existing perspectives. In another example, the user may share a perspective with another user, who can derive further useful information.

Through the use of knowledge and perspective spaces, users can thus group information entities to form cohesive and coherent bodies of knowledge, which can be organised, searched and explored, from within perspectives or across perspectives to possibly formulate new information.

Information and Support Tools

The above sections have covered various information entities that the user while working with information in information space. These information entities include the rep, infogroups and organisation structures, metas, associations, periodicals, views, knowledge spaces and perspective spaces. Each of the different information entities brings a different dimension into the information space, expressing new forms of information. Each different type of information entities has a manager, which governs the creation, management and behaviour of their corresponding information entities. Some or the more important aspects of the managers, usually manifested through behaviour of their respective information entities, have been explored above.

Apart from information entities and their managers which typically work directly and contribute directly to the information space, the system also provides various tools that work across all entities in the information space. One of the tools have been discussed above, the information collector, which forms one of the important functions of the system which brings in clusters of information satisfying specified queries. Other tools include the search tool, which provides a search interface for the user to perform searches within the information space; the filtering tool, which filters items from a given set based on some criteria; the compare tool, which performs comparison of two similar items according to some unit of comparison; the intersection tool, which returns the intersection of two sets of items; the demarcation tool, which allows units of information displayed to be demarcated. These tools will be explored further below.

Search Tool The system allows the user to create and work upon multiple dimensions of information spaces. This adds to the richness of the information and knowledge that users can express and derive. Users may at times need to search for certain information or knowledge within this cloud of information to find a certain piece of information they want, or to explore different aspects of the information space. The search tool is thus provided to allow the user to easily perform both targeted and exploratory search of the information space, which can include both information stored within the system as well as in external systems.

In one aspect, the search tool may make use of the information collector to perform search and clustering. The information collector is a subsystem used by many parts of the system to find and cluster together information satisfying some query. While the main use of the information collector is to gather clustered information into the information space, it is possible in an embodiment for the search tool to make use of the capabilities of the information collector to search for information. In this case, the search tool also makes use of the meta search capabilities of the information collector to instantly retrieve information from a multiplicity of information sources.

In another aspect, the search tool is able to handle queries of a rich language set. Due to the richness of the high dimension of and the many forms of information from various locations that can all exist within the information space, it is crucial that the search tool allows the user to express very dynamic queries so the user can easily look for the information he wants. Such queries might include the ability to have images, sound, annotations, meta and other forms of information not limited to text. For example, the user might be able to specify a query which instructs the search tool to retrieve all images similar to a supplied image which is related to a certain contact. In another example, the search tool may use a concept of same-meaners to retrieve items of similar meaning to each other, rather than a simple keyword based search. Implementations of interfaces for specifications such search queries might be added as plug ins into the system, as many possible implementations exist and can be tailor made to better suit the purposes of different embodiments of the system and search patterns of the users. In another aspect, the search tool provides facilities for searching within high dimension space. In a high dimension information space, a faceted search system using a combination of search and explore techniques might yield more relevant, precise and accurate results compared to the tradition search systems that simply return a set of results given a single query. An embodiment of such a system might have a set of queries, where each query can be activated or deactivated by checking or un-checking a visual representation of the queries, so that results pertaining to the intersection of results of all queries can be returned. For example, the user might be able to add more queries to a query set to refine the search results, un-check or check queries in a query set to return results that satisfy a combination of queries. Users might also create queries that work on results from existing queries. Such a multidimensional query multidimensional referential search system can allow the user to perform better search for information in the high dimensional information space.

In another aspect, the search tool may work at different scopes, which it is able to easily switch between. The scopes may include information space scope, knowledge space or perspective space scope, information entity scope, or scopes relevant to other information sources the system is aware of. By allowing the user to scope the search tool to a specific area or dimension within the information space, the results returned can be more relevant to the needs of the user and sensitive to the context the user has in mind. This translates to a better overall search experience.

In another aspect, results returned by the search tool can be converted into relevant information entities. This capability allows the user to seamlessly move information retrieved by the search tool into other parts of the system and the information space. For example, a set of results returned by the search tool can be moved by the user into the information space, where a set of corresponding reps will be automatically created and the user can create organisation structures to further organise the information. This organisation structure can then be used by the user in the future to perform some task or to easily access the searched information.

In summary, the search tool provides capabilities for the user to seamlessly search for information in the information space, where this information can be further processed and managed.

Demarcation Tool

The demarcation tool is provided as a utility which allows users to easily distinguish items displayed that are relevant in the current context. The demarcation tool is used by both system and user. In one aspect, many subsystems such as the filtering tool, compare tool and intersection tool make use of demarcations to distinguish to the user information they have processed. In another aspect, the user can use the demarcation tool to demarcate items which he might want to distinguish from other items in a same collection. We will see how demarcation can be used by the filtering, compare and intersection tools.

Filtering Tool

In many instances, given a large amount of information the user may want to quickly filter out items that satisfy certain criteria, thus making the information more precise. For example, the search tool might return a large set of results that are all relevant. The user mignt find it difficult to look through individually every result to find the desired item. The filter tool can be used to refine the set of results so that items satisfying certain criteria are demarcated, thus distinguished from the other items. The user can then quickly pick out this desired item. In another example, the user might want to quickly see items within a large information space or organisation structure that satisfy certain criteria. The filter tool satisfies this through its capabilities to filter and demarcate filtered items using the demarcation tool.

Compare Tool

In many instance, it is useful for the user to be able to compare sets of information to find similarities and differences between them, in order to better understand the information presented and to possibly derive other information. The compare tool is used to satisfy this requirement, and the similarities and differences can be highlighted through the use of demarcations provided by the demarcation tool. It is also possible in certain embodiments to group the similarities and differences using possibly infogroups so that the two different sets can be individually operated and further processed. The compare tool thus provides another useful system capabilities for the user to make sense of and operate upon the information space. Some examples of comparisons might include comparing of reps, infogroups, organisation structures and even different knowledge spaces.

Case Study of Possible Embodiments The above sections have covered the core areas of the invention, including the concept behind the invention, a general system structure of the invention, information spaces, information collection, and working in high dimension space with different concepts and implementations of information entities, and run through of possible information and support tools embodiments of the system can provide. There are many possible uses and embodiments of the invention, including some of the below listed: • A system for the search, exploration and organisation of information

• A system for the exploration of information via multiple views and representations

• A system which manages diverse types of information from different locations in a single place

• A system that allows users to pen down, organise, recall, create and find relationships between disparate ideas and information • An information re-representation system for viewing of structured or unstructured information

• A client/server system which allows different users to have different views of same server information

• A system for project management

In the following sections, case studies of two possible embodiments which implement a substantial set of the ideas in the present invention will be explored. The first case study focuses on an embodiment of the invention developed for enterprise knowledge management in a server/client intranet environment with multiple users, while the second case study explores some of the features found in an embodiment of the invention for a collaborative software application which assists users in project management and planning. Case Study of a Server/Client Knowledge Management System

An embodiment of the present invention is presented. The embodiment is an enterprise knowledge management software which operates in a computer environment consisting or one server or a group of servers and a multiplicity of client computers. Information in the information space is located on both client computers and servers. Sources of information include client file systems, server file systems, information sources from other enterprise content management systems, databases and the internet. In addition, in the computer environment a web search engine exists which indexes a substantial amount of information from both relevant websites on the internet and the intranet website.

The embodiment consists of two implementations. There is a server application which focuses on the storage layer and operations layer. The server application in this case stores a substantial amount of information to be shared by all client applications. It also communicates with the web search engine to retrieve information from both internet and intranet sources. The other implementation is the client implementation, which consists of the storage layer for storage of local information, the operations layer and the representation layer. The client implementation is able to both process information on the local system as described in the description of the invention, and also connects to the server application via a network connector, to allow the user to fetch and work on relevant information provided by the server implementation. As the main role of the server implementation is to store common client information and pipe results from the search engine, we will not be exploring the server implementation in details. We will instead focus on the implementation of the client application, which is created in spirit of the invention.

The client application from the user's perspective has three panels - a search and filter panel, an organiser panel, and an information panel. Search allows the user to search for information provided by the server, in the client computer, in the system, and in other client computers subjected to user rights. Search results are presented in the information panel. Organiser allows the user to pull any information into the information panel, possibly from search. The organiser allows user to create and switch between different organisation structures that are used to organise information via reps. The information panel displays relevant information depending on the user's current action and the state of the system. Throughout the application, users can easily meta and associate information. Periodicals are also implemented in this system, allowing users to review versions of information. In addition, the system allows the user to pull in information anywhere from the computer environment. The client application has also a toolbar from which many functions, including periodicals, can be activated.

The user is exploring information on the shared information repository on the server via the client application. In the organiser, a view is provided showing a hierarchical organisation of the repository. The user has only the ability to modify a small part of the repository which he has management rights to. The user has read access to some other parts of the repository, but not write and modification access. While working on a task, the user has to use information from different places of the repository corresponding to the information belonging to the user's colleagues. In this scenario, the user has the option to create within the organiser a new organisation structure for this task, pull in the information from the different parts of the repository pertaining to his task. The user is then able to reorganise the information in a way that is relevant to the task. At the same time, the user might have emails, files or other information on his local computer which is relevant to the task. These information can be brought in to the organisation structure created for the task, where disparate information can be organised within and accessed from a single place. On the other hand, the user has the option to pull local information onto the organisation structure representing the information repository on the server computer, and has the option to share the information with the other users.

The user needs to perform a search for a certain piece of information which he is not sure of is location. Using the search tool, the user is able to enter a query and initiate a search. As the user is unsure of the location, the search tool is set to look within the scope of the entire information space. The search results are then displayed in the information panel, with portions of the information that match the criteria in the query highlighted. The user can then look for the item within the results set. If the set of relevant results is too large, the user can use the filter tool to refine the results. At the same time, within the information panel, the user can switch between different representation views for the results, so that the results can be classified and sorted differently. In the event that the required item cannot be found, the user can have the option to change his query or to enter additional queries. The set of queries can be checked/un-checked to allow the user a faceted search for his information. At the same time, the user is able to view the contents of the selected result item within the information panel. A details toggle allows the user to optionally see all extrinsic information related to the results item, such as metas, associations, its locations in different organisation structures, etc. Through the use of multiple appearances highlighting, when the user activates this function on a selected results item, the location of the item will be highlighted within the organisation structures in the organiser. In this case, the user will be able to see where the item resides in logically and physically, both on the organisation structures the user has defined and also on the physical organisation on the information repository at the server. When the user has found the item, he can easily pull the item into the organisation structure created above for the task.

The user is working on a task. Relevant information has been found by the user in a web page from a certain website. The user can create a representation of the website within the organisation structure through a few ways. One way would be to explicitly create a new rep, then provide the URL of the webpage. The second method will involve simply clicking and dragging the webpage into the organiser. After the webpage is represented in the system via reps, the user can choose to edit the information on the webpage without affecting the actual website. The user also finds relevant information in the form of a passage in a document created by a colleague found in the server's repository. The user can create a rep out of the passage and organise the rep within the organiser. Whenever either the webpage or the passage has been modified, either by the webmaster or the colleague respectively, the system is able to track and inform the user of the changes. The user can choose to apply the changes or leave the reps at the original information. Even after the user has chosen to apply the changes, the user can always have an option to review past history of the changes in the rep via the periodicals, which can be activated and shown. The user is able to rollback the changes to a previous version of the rep when desired. On the other aspect, if the user has write access to the document or the webpage, the user can easily modify the rep, after which changes made on the rep can be committed to the actual information in the document and webpage. The client application by default provides three useful infogroups found within the organiser for the user. These are the Keep in Sight, Important and Interesting categories respectively. By introducing meaning through this infogroups, the user is able to make use of these categories to place frequently accessed information into the different categories. More user defined categories can also be created as infogroups or organisation structures. The user can also remove the infogroups easily when they are no longer needed, without affecting the information linked from the infogroups. In a possible scenario, an item might be both interesting and important, and the one item can be made to be referenced from both infogroups respectively without having to create multiple copies of the same item.

The user might have to export the organisation structure created for a task to another system. The export function of the client application comes into play, allowing the user to export to a format that the system can understand. For example, if the organisation structure contains mainly files arranged in a customised hierarchical structure, it can be exported to a physical file folder structure on the file system.

The user might have additional information he wants to place on a piece of information. The user is able to do this through a myriad of ways, including the augmenting of meta on the information or annotating directly on the contents of the information. When the user sees possibly a few files and other information such as emails and contacts that he wishes to associate to make them related to each other, he can easily select the information and call upon the associater to create a weakly or strongly typed relationship, possibly unidirectional or bidirectional. The user can also set conditionals on certain associations so that they exist only if certain conditions are met.

An embodiment of the present invention in the form of a server/client knowledge management system has been discussed. Scenarios discussed illustrate the different implementations of the concepts of the invention, which can be used in combination to achieve useful results and satisfy user needs.

Case Study of a Collaborative Project Workspace Application

In this second case study, the embodiment of the present invention is a collaborative project workspace application which operates in a typical computer environment which is linked to the internet. Sources of information in the information space include files in the file system, information on the internet and information in other application software on the computer.

The application consists of mainly three panels - a whiteboard, and a view of available users collaborating on the whiteboard (or workspace), and a view of knowledge and perspective spaces. This application implements nearly all concepts discussed of the invention, namely information collector, information space, all forms of discussed information entities and their managers, and tools. The tools provide access to dialogs such as search and filter. In this embodiment of the invention, users can communicate via a voice communication system, and a video capture of collaborators may be available. A user initiates a collaboration session by signing in to the system and creating a new project workspace under a certain name. The user than invites other collaborators into the workspace. In this instance, the workspace is an implementation of the concept of a knowledge space, which creates a space for a specific domain of knowledge or task. The collaborators can then work within this knowledge space together on the project. After the end of every session, the knowledge space can be saved by the initiator. Non initiators have the option to save a local copy of the workspace and continue working on it, where the changes can be merged at the start of the new collaboration session.

The collaborators individually amass information into the workspace. All views on the different computers are updated synchronously when new information is added. In the spirit of reps and organisation structures, these information can come nearly from any source of information, including the different websites, documents, files, music, videos, intranets, information devices, and other sources of information that the different collaborators individually have access to. Certain transient information may have to be stored in the storage layer of the applications, so that the information can be retrieved even when the source is no longer available. All these disparate forms of information from disparate sources can be amassed into the single knowledge space represented visually by the workspace. The behaviour of the rep can differ on per rep basis, depending on the details of the information. AU these details are handled by the information manager, which can be configured and customised by the user.

The collaborators can work on the continuous stream of information using tools and information entities. The collaborators mainly use pen, keyboard and voice input to meta, associate, organise and create new information relevant to the project. Information can be easily associated by drawing links between different information. Annotations can be written directly on information. As each collaborator may be in charge of certain aspects of the project, perspective spaces can be created so that the different collaborators can simply work within the specific perspective spaces that are free of clutter from other information not relevant to the perspective. Collaborators have also the option to switch between the different perspectives that the other collaborators are working on, to understand other aspects of the project. When a collaborator is satisfied with the new or modified information in a perspective, he can choose to commit the changes on to the knowledge space proper.

The user of this system can easily switch between different representations of the information space. For example, the user can switch to an information cloud view where all associations and meta data can be shown in a 3D space. The user can also switch to a flat view which may show how the information is organised in a mind map. The user can also switch to a collaborator view which can show the associations between the information and the collaborators. The user can also switch to a periodical view, which shows how the project has evolved over time. Any view of the information space is possible as long as an implementation is available. With possible a keystroke or flick of the pen, the user can switch to the most commonly used view, the document view, which shows the current information the user is working on. When the project is completed, the initiator can cnoose to archive the project by saving it and possibly generating reports containing different views of the project and its logs. The user can continue working simultaneously on a host of other projects by creating parallel knowledge spaces.

An embodiment of the present invention in the form of a collaborative project workspace application has been discussed. Scenarios discussed illustrate the implementations of the many concepts of the invention, which is used to achieve a flexible, dynamic and multidimensional system for people to collaborate on.

Conclusion Concepts and systems in accordance with the present invention are disclosed. Although the present invention has been described in accordance with the embodiments above, one of skill in the art will readily recognise that there could be variations to the embodiments and those variations would be within the spirit and scope of the present invention. Accordingly, many modifications may be made by one of skill in the art without departing from the spirit and scope of the claims.

Claims

The embodiments of the invention in which an exclusive property or privilege is claimed are defined as follow:

1. One or more computer-readable storage media having computer-executable components, or one or more computer systems, for implementing a method or system comprising of information entities and processors for information entities.

2. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 1 , further comprising a feature where the system is able to work upon information existing outside the computer environment, examples being online web information, streaming media and information from other computer environments.

3. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 1, further comprising a feature where the system is able to work upon information inputted into the system possibly by the user or other systems, examples being annotations, sketches and drawings.

4. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 1 , further comprising a feature where the system is able to work upon information derived from information from any information sources, examples being reports and statistics. 5. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 1, further comprising a structure consisting of layers, an example being the following three layers: A storage layer, an operations layer, and a representation layer.

6. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the storage layer is able to store information inputted into the system or created by the system. 7. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the storage layer itself is designed to be a layered system possibly similar to protocol stacks: a generic base, with additional functions and protocols to introduce structure for information at higher layers.

8. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the storage layer has the ability to store any type of information in a manner which allows for ease of interpretation.

9. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the operations layer consists of subsystems concerned with the information operations that the system can perform on the information space, which includes information located within and outside of the system.

10. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the operations layer may consist of both system and user centric functions: System centric functions are defined as functions used internally by the system; User centric functions are defined as functions related directly to user functions which are often visible to the user.

1 1. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the user typically invokes user centric functions through subsystems in the representation layer. 12. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising a feature where the representation layer consists of subsystems that presents information or results of operations and allow the user to manipulate information through means of controlling the information operations subsystems; The representation layer subsystems might take into account the details of the underlying hardware and user preferences in order to decide on suitable representations to use, and the representation layer can work based on different visual metaphors depending on the type of computer environment the system is operating on.

13. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising the information space, which is the totality of information and related information accessible and available for use by the system, which forms the basis of the system, and which allows the integrative synthesis of information with user ideas, and which allows any form of information to be represented within the system, and which allows a countable but possibly unbounded set of operations to act upon the information.

14. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 13, where the information space is a network of interlinked in-memory objects. 15. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 13, where the information space is a persistent layer utilising a relational database for representation of the information. 16. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 13, further comprising methods of gathering information into the information space through user inputs, user directed system collection and system collection without direct user involvement. 17. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 16, further comprising a subsystem to allow information to be consolidated based on some criteria, and the system is able to pull information from both internal and external systems, possibly directly or indirectly through other systems or other forms of proxies.

18. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 13, further comprising information entities which make up, enrich and create additional dimensions in the information space.

19. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18, further comprising reps which are representations of any form of information, which allows the system to work and represent all information regardless of lower level details of the data such as type, location, granularity, life time, editability.

20. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising the information manager subsystem which manages all these multiplicity of forms of representations of information and the details involved in mapping the external information with information entities in the information space.

21. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a protocol where applications conforming to this protocol can provide the necessary mappers from information to reps.

22. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a plug in host which the mappers can be added into the system as plug-ins by various authors for different information types and sources.

23. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where reps present a single unified object interface to all types of information external to the system, and at the same time introduce information operations through this proxy. 24. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where reps may also be information representations of processed data.

25. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where reps can represent any form of information, and through various implementations, represent the information in any form.

26. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where reps can be system defined, user defined or both.

27. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where attributes on reps can be set to inform the information manager that any changes to the information the rep represents are to be tracked, which then proper action can be taken.

28. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where when information the rep represents may have been updated, removed or in other ways changed, the user has the option to update the rep with the modified information, or to have the rep remain at the original representation of the unmodified information. 29. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where upon occurrences of change of the information entities, the user has the option to update the information with the modified data, or to create a new copy of the modified data. 30. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where multiple reps to the same information can be created. 31. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising a feature where reps can store copies of information locally within the system or remotely in some storage network when needed, such as when the information the rep references is removed, a copy of the information can be contained within the rep possibly through the information manager to ensure the continuity and consistency of the system. 32. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising organisation structures which are used to organise information and allow information to be organised via different structures, examples being hierarchies, ontological structures,_graphs, lists and tables. 33. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising infogroups which provide the capability to group related or unrelated information together. 34. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms and from different sources to make them coherent to each other. 35. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where infogroups can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both 36. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where information can exist across a number of different groups.

37. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organisation structures extend upon and inherit the various aspects of infogroups.

38. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organisation structures can comprise of hierarchies, ontological structures, graphs, lists, tables and other possible structures.

39. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organisation structures can be automatically populated by the system.

40. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organiser can import external structures as organisation structures.

41. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organisation structures can be exported to external structures.

42. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where attributes on organisation structures can be set to inform the organisation structure manager of which changes to certain external or internal organisation structures are to be tracked, where certain actions can then be performed on the organisation structure.

43. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where an organisation structure that is set to be linked with another external or internal organisation structure, when the linked organisation structure may have been updated, removed or in other ways changed, the user has the option to update the organisation structure with the changes made in the linked structure.

44. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where an organisation structure that is set to be linked with another external or internal organisation structure, when the organisation structure may have been updated, removed or in other ways changed, the linked external or internal organisation structure can be updated or remain unchanged. 45. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organisation structures allow users to organise information semantically for user tasks. 46. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where organisation structures allow users to explore or organise information in different ways to allow the user to explore information through different dimensions and aspects. 47. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising a feature where for information in the same locality within organisation structures, where the information is located in can be made known upon activation of the later information.

48. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising metas which allow users to express additional information about existing data or information, describing the information entities above their basic content and meaning.

49. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising a feature where metas are dependent on the parent information entity they describe.

50. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising a feature where metas can be applied on any information, such as the contents of documents, files, pictures, hyperlinks and other information entities.

51. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising a feature where metas can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both.

52. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising a feature where metas are dependent on the information they describe. 53. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising of annotations, which are derived from the implementation of metas.

54. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising associations which allow different information to be associated together to express some relationship.

55. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where associations allow inter-information entities information to be expressed or created

56. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where associations can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both.

57. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where associations can be strongly typed or weakly typed, where weakly typed associations typically have only simple labels to describe the type of association while strongly typed associations can have additional attributes to describe the state of the relationship.

58. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where associations can contain two or more references to information that are involved in the relationship.

59. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where associations can be unidirectional or bidirectional.

60. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where multiple associations can operate on same or different sets of information.

61. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising a feature where information entities associated to an information entity can be made known to the user when it is activated upon.

62. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising periodicals which are evolution of information entities over time.

63. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising various functions, examples being the ability to review past versions of information and the ability to revert to past versions of information.

64. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising a feature where periodicals can be configured to keep track of both changes to intrinsic aspects of the information, such as its content, and extrinsic aspects of the information, such as change in relationships or metas.

65. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising a feature where periodicals can be continuous, where continuous periodicals capture every possible change on an information entity, so that users or the system can revert or view any point state in time, having the full state of information with dimension of time captured.

66. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising a feature where periodicals can be discrete which works on the concept of snapshots, where certain important states in time are captured and stored, where discrete periodicals do not allow the user to review every possible state of the information in time, but only selected important moments, and snapshots can capture the entire state or only changes, whichever is more preferred in the embodiment based on considerations such as time needed to retrieve a state or space needed to store an entire state or only progressive changes.

67. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising a feature where users can demarcate certain important versions of the information along its evolution

68. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising views which allow the user means of visualising and working on information entities through visual representations that can represent different aspects of the high dimension space of information, possibly through dimension clustering, classification and reduction.

69. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where views allow for visualization of different types of information entities, such as groups, reps, metas and associations, to allow the use to understand the information intrinsic and extrinsic to the information entities. 70. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where views can work at multiple levels of details.

71. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where views can be quickly toggled to show different perspectives of the same results.

72. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where multiple views can be displayed at the same time, where the views can show different dimensions of the same information entity, or show non-related information entities in the locality, to allow the user to have a multi-faceted view of the information, allowing better correlating and understanding the information.

73. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where views can show different representations of the same information. 74. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where views can show results of system processes and tools acting on a set of information entities.

75. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where users can demarcate and highlight on information entities or collections of information entities in views.

76. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where views can highlight multiple appearances of the same information entity.

77. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where the system can rapidly switch between different views of information entities.

78. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising a feature where users can manipulate and edit the information entities through views. 79. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising knowledge spaces, which create entire systems of knowledge for specific domain or tasks.

80. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 79, further comprising perspective spaces which introduce a higher dimension of contextual spaces within information and knowledge spaces, allowing entities to be related in different ways without affecting the actual information. 81. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 79, further comprising a feature where knowledge and perspective spaces can be actively reused, expanded, evolved and shared leading to formulation of new knowledge.

82. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising a feature • where each information entity type has a corresponding manager which governs the creation, management and behaviour of their corresponding information entities.

83. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising the search tool which allows the user to easily perform both targeted and exploratory search of the information space, which can include both information stored within the system as well as in external systems.

84. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 83, further comprising a feature where the search tool may make use of the information collector to perform search and clustering.

85. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 83, further comprising a feature where the search tool is able to handle queries of a rich language set.

86. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 83, further comprising a feature where the search tool provides facilities for searching within high dimension space via faceted search. 87. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 83, further comprising a feature where the search tool is able to work at different scopes, where scopes may include information space scope, knowledge space or perspective space scope, information entity scope, or scopes relevant to other information sources the system is aware of.

88. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 83, further comprising a feature where results returned by the search tool can be converted into relevant information entities.

89. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising the filter tool which is used to refine results from sets of existing results.

90. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising the compare tool which allows the user to be able to compare sets of information to find similarities and differences between them, in order to better understand the information presented and to possibly derive other information.

91. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising the demarcation tool, which is provided as a utility which allows users to easily distinguish items displayed which are relevant in the current context. 92. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 91, further comprising a feature where subsystems such as the search tool, filtering tool and compare tool make use of demarcations to distinguish to the user information they have processed.

93. One or more computer-readable storage media having computer-executable components, or one or more computer systems, for implementing a method or system comprising: Information entities and processors for information entities

A feature where the system is able to work upon information existing outside the computer environment

A feature where the system is able to work upon information inputted into the system possibly by the user or other systems

A feature where the system is able to work upon information derived from information from any information sources

94. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 1 , further comprising:

A structure consisting of layers, an example being the following three layers: A storage layer, an operations layer, and a representation layer.

A feature where the storage layer is able to store information inputted into the system or created by the system.

A feature where the storage layer has the ability to store any type of information in a manner which allows for ease of interpretation.

A feature where the operations layer consists of subsystems concerned with the information operations that the system can perform on the information space, which includes information located within and outside of the system. A feature where the operations layer may consist of both system and user centric functions: System centric functions are defined as functions used internally by the system; User centric functions are defined as functions related directly to user functions which are visible to the user.

A feature where the representation layer consists of subsystems that presents information or results of operations and allow the user to manipulate information through means of controlling the information operations subsystems; The representation layer subsystems might take into account the details of the underlying hardware and user preferences in order to decide on suitable representations to use, and the representation layer can work based on different visual metaphors depending on the type of computer environment the system is operating on. 95. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 5, further comprising:

The information space, which is the totality of information and related information accessible and available for use by the system, which forms the basis of the system, and which allows the integrative synthesis of information with user ideas, and which allows any form of information to be represented within the system, and which allows a countable but possibly unbounded set of operations to act upon the information.

Methods of gathering information into the information space through user inputs, user directed system collection and system collection without direct user involvement.

A feature which allows information to be consolidated based on some criteria, and the system is able to pull information from both internal and external systems, possibly directly or indirectly through other systems or other forms of proxies.

96. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18, further comprising:

Reps which are representations of any form of information, which allows the system to work and represent all information regardless of lower level details of the data.

The information manager subsystem which manages all these multiplicity of forms of representations of information and the details involved in mapping the external information with information entities in the information space.

A feature where reps present a single unified object interface to all types of information external to the system, and at the same time introduce information operations through this proxy.

A feature where reps may also be information representations of processed data. A feature where reps can be system defined, user defined or both.

A feature where when information the rep represents may have been updated, removed or in other ways changed, the user has the option to update the rep with the modified information, or to have the rep remain at the original representation of the unmodified information.

A feature where reps can store copies of information locally within the system or remotely in some storage network when needed, such as when the information the rep references is removed, a copy of the information can be contained within the rep possibly through the information manager to ensure the continuity and consistency of the system.

97. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising: Organisation structures which are used to organise information and allow information tojbe organised via different structures. Infogroups which provide the capability to group related or unrelated information together.

A feature where infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms and from different sources to make them coherent to each other.

A feature where infogroups can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both A feature where information can exist across a number of different groups.

A feature where organisation structures extend upon and inherit the various aspects of infogroups.

A feature where organisation structures can be automatically populated by the system.

A feature where organiser can import external structures as organisation structures.

A feature where organisation structures can be exported to external structures. A feature where attributes on reps can be set to inform the information manager that any changes to the information the rep represents are to be tracked, which then proper action can be take.

A feature where an organisation structure that is set to be linked with another external or internal organisation structure, when the linked organisation structure may have been updated, removed or in other ways changed, the user has the option to update the organisation structure with the changes made in the linked structure.

A feature where an organisation structure that is set to be linked with another external or internal organisation structure, when the organisation structure may have been updated, removed or in other ways changed, the linked external or internal organisation structure can be updated or remain unchanged.

A feature where organisation structures allow users to organise information semantically for user tasks. A feature where organisation structures allow users to explore or organise information in different ways to allow the user to explore information through different dimensions and aspects.

A feature where information in the same locality within organisation structures a piece of information is location in can be made known upon activation of the later information.

98. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising: Metas which allow users to express additional information about existing data or information, describing the information entities above their basic content and meaning.

A feature where metas are dependent on the parent information entity they describe.

A feature where metas can be applied on any information, such as the contents of documents, files, pictures, hyperlinks and other information entities. A feature where metas can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both.

A feature where metas are dependent on the information they describe.

99. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising: Periodicals which are evolution of information entities over time.

Various functions, examples being the ability to review past versions of information and the ability to revert to past versions of information.

A feature where periodicals can be configured to keep track of both changes to intrinsic aspects of the information, such as its content, and extrinsic aspects of the information, such as change in relationships or metas.

A feature where periodicals can be continuous, where continuous periodicals capture every possible change on an information entity, so that users or the system can revert or view any point state in time, having the full state ot information with dimension of time captured.

A feature where periodicals can be discrete which works on the concept of snapshots, where certain important states in time are captured and stored, where discrete periodicals do not allow the user to review every possible state of the information in time, but only selected important moments, and snapshots can capture the entire state or only changes, whichever is more preferred in the embodiment based on considerations such as time needed to retrieve a state or space needed to store an entire state or only progressive changes.

A feature where users can demarcate certain important versions of the information along its evolution l OO.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising: Views which allow the user means of visualising and working on information entities through visual representations that can represent different aspects of the high dimension space of information, possibly through dimension clustering, classification and reduction.

A feature where views allow for visualization of different types of information entities, such as groups, reps, metas and associations, to allow the use to understand the information intrinsic and extrinsic to the information entities.

A feature where views can work at multiple levels of details.

A feature where views can be quickly toggled to show different perspectives of the same results.

A feature where multiple views can be displayed at the same time, where the views can show different dimensions of the same information entity, or show non-related information entities in the locality, to allow the user to have a multi-faceted view of the information, allowing better correlating and understanding the information.

A feature where views can show different representations of the same information.

A feature where views can show results of system processes and tools acting on a set of information entities. A feature where users can demarcate and highlight on information entities or collections of information entities in views.

A feature where views can highlight multiple appearances of the same information entity.

A feature where the system can rapidly switch between different views of information entities.

A feature where users can manipulate and edit the information entities through views. 101. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Knowledge spaces, which create entire systems of knowledge for specific domain or tasks.

Perspective spaces which introduce a higher dimension of contextual spaces within information and knowledge spaces, allowing entities to be related in different ways without affecting the actual information. A feature where knowledge and perspective spaces can be actively reused, expanded, evolved and shared leading to formulation of new knowledge. 102.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

The search tool which allows the user to easily perform both targeted and exploratory search of the information space, which can include both information stored within the system as well as in external systems. A feature where the search tool may make use oτ the information collector to perform search and clustering.

A feature where the search tool is able to handle queries of a rich language set.

A feature where the search tool provides facilities for searching within high dimension space via faceted search.

A feature where the search tool is able to work at different scopes, where scopes may include information space scope, knowledge space or perspective space scope, information entity scope, or scopes relevant to other information sources the system is aware of.

A feature where results returned by the search tool can be converted into relevant information entities. 103. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Metas which allow users to express additional information about existing data or information, describing the information entities above their basic content and meaning.

Associations which allows different information to be associated together to express some relationship. 104. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising: Organisation structures which are used to organise information and allow information to be organised via different structures.

Associations which allows different information to be associated together to express some relationship. 105. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Organisation structures which are used to organise information and allow information to be organised via different structures.

Metas which allow users to express additional information about existing data or information, describing the information entities above their basic content and meaning. Associations which allows different information to be associated together to express some relationship.

Periodicals which are evolution of information entities over time. 106.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Organisation structures which are used to organise information and allow information to be organised via different structures. Metas which allow users to express additional information about existing data or information, describing the information entities above their basic content and meaning.

Associations which allows different information to be associated together to express some relationship.

Views which allow the user means of visualising and working on information entities through visual representations that can represent different aspects of the high dimension space of information, possibly through dimension clustering, classification and reduction.

107.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Knowledge spaces, which create entire systems of knowledge for specific domain or tasks. 108. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Periodicals which are evolution of information entities over time. Views which allow the user means of visualising and working on information entities through visual representations that can represent different aspects of the high dimension space of information, possibly through dimension clustering, classification and reduction.

Perspective spaces which introduce a higher dimension of contextual spaces within information and knowledge spaces, allowing entities to be related in different ways without affecting the actual information. 109.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

Periodicals which are evolution of information entities over time.

Perspective spaces which introduce a higher dimension of contextual spaces within information and knowledge spaces, allowing entities to be related in different ways without affecting the actual information.

Search tool which allows the user to easily perform both targeted and exploratory search of the information space, which can include both information stored within the system as well as in external systems.

Filter tool which is used to refine results from sets of existing results. Demarcation tool, which is provided as a utility which allows users to easily distinguish items displayed which are relevant in the current context. 1 l O.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 13, further comprising:

The information space which is a persistent layer utilising a relational database for representation of the information A subsystem to allow information to be consolidated based on some criteria, and the system is able to pull information from both internal and external systems, possibly directly or indirectly through other systems or other forms of proxies. 1 1 1.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 13, further comprising:

The information space which is a persistent layer utilising a relational database for representation of the information

A subsystem to allow information to be consolidated based on some criteria, and the system is able to pull information from both internal and external systems, possibly directly or indirectly through other systems or other forms of proxies.

Information entities which make up, enrich and create additional dimensions in the information space. 1 12. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising:

A feature where reps can be system defined, user defined or both. A feature where reps can store copies of information locally within the system or remotely in some storage network when needed, such as when the information the rep references is removed, a copy of the information can be contained within the rep possibly through the information manager to ensure the continuity and consistency of the system.

1 13. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising: The information manager subsystem which manages all these multiplicity of forms of representations of information and the details involved in mapping the external information with information entities in the information space.

A feature where reps can be system defined, user defined or both.

A feature where reps present a single unified object interface to all types of information external to the system, and at the same time introduce information operations through this proxy. 1 14. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising:

A feature where upon occurrences of change of the information entities, the user has the option to update the information with the modified data, or to create a new copy of the modified data.

A feature where reps can store copies of information locally within the system or remotely in some storage network when needed, such as when the information the rep references is removed, a copy of the information can be contained within the rep possioly through the information manager to ensure the continuity and consistency of the system. 1 15. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 19, further comprising:

A feature where multiple reps to the same information can be created. A feature where reps can store copies of information locally within the system or remotely in some storage network when needed, such as when the information the rep references is removed, a copy of the information can be contained within the rep possibly through the information manager to ensure the continuity and consistency of the system.

1 l ό.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising: Infogroups which provide the capability to group related or unrelated information together.

A feature where infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms and from different sources to make them coherent to each other. 1 17. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising:

Infogroups which provide the capability to group related or unrelated information together. A feature where infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms and from different sources to make them coherent to each other.

A feature where information can exist across a number of different groups. 1 l δ.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising:

A feature where information can exist across a number of different groups.

1 19. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising:

Infogroups which provide the capability to group related or unrelated information together.

A feature where infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms and from different sources to make them coherent to each other. A feature where organisation structures can be automatically populated by the system.

120. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising:

A feature where infogroups enable the grouping together of information that can be of very different forms and from different sources to make them coherent to each other. A feature where information can exist across a number of different groups.

A feature where organisation structures can be automatically populated by the system. 121.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 32, further comprising:

A feature where organisation structures allow users to organise information semantically for user tasks. 122. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising:

A feature where metas can be applied on any information, such as the contents of documents, files, pictures, hyperlinks and other information entities.

A feature where metas can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both. 123. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 48, further comprising:

A feature where metas are dependent on the information they describe. 124.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising:

A feature where associations allow inter-information entities information to be expressed or created.

A feature where associations can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both. 125. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising:

A feature where associations can be user defined, system defined or a combination of both.

A feature where associations can be strongly typed or weakly typed, where weakly typed associations typically have only simple labels to describe the type of association while strongly typed associations can have additional attributes to describe the state of the relationship.

126. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising:

A feature where associations can be unidirectional or bidirectional. 127.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising:

A feature where associations can be unidirectional or bidirectional.

A feature where multiple associations can operate on same or different sets of information. 128. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 54, further comprising:

A feature where associations can be strongly typed or weakly typed, where weakly typed associations typically have only simple labels to describe the type of association while strongly typed associations can have additional attributes to describe the state of the relationship. A feature where associations can be unidirectional or bidirectional.

A feature where multiple associations can operate on same or different sets of information. 129.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising:

13O.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising: A feature where periodicals can be configured to keep track of both changes to intrinsic aspects of the information, such as its content, and extrinsic aspects of the information, such as change in relationships or metas.

A feature where periodicals can be continuous, where continuous periodicals capture every possible change on an information entity, so that users or the system can revert or view any point state in time, having the full state of information with dimension of time captured.

131 .The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising:

A feature where periodicals can be configured to keep track of both changes to intrinsic aspects of the information, such as its content, and extrinsic aspects of the information, such as change in relationships or metas. A feature where periodicals can be discrete which works on the concept of snapshots, where certain important states in time are captured and stored, where discrete periodicals do not allow the user to review every possible state of the information in time, but only selected important moments, and snapshots can capture the entire state or only changes, whichever is more preferred in the embodiment based on considerations such as time needed to retrieve a state or space needed to store an entire state or only progressive changes.

132.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising:

A feature where users can demarcate certain important versions of the information along its evolution 133. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising:

A feature where periodicals can be continuous, where continuous periodicals capture every possible change on an information entity, so that users or the system can revert or view any point state in time, having the full state of information with dimension of time captured. A feature where users can demarcate certain important versions of the information along its evolution.

134.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 62, further comprising:

A feature where users can demarcate certain important versions of the information along its evolution 135.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising:

A feature where views can work at multiple levels of details.

A feature where views can be quickly toggled to show different perspectives of the same results. 136.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising:

A feature where views can work at multiple levels of details.

A feature where users can demarcate and highlight on information entities or collections of information entities in views. 137.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising:

A feature where views can work at multiple levels of details.

A feature where users can demarcate and highlight on information entities or collections of information entities in views.

A feature where the system can rapidly switch between different views of information entities. 138.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising:

A feature where multiple views can be displayed at the same time, where the views can show different dimensions of the same information entity, or show non-related information entities in the locality, to allow the user to have a multi-faceted view of the information, allowing better correlating and understanding the information. A feature where views can highlight multiple appearances of the same information entity.

139.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 68, further comprising:

A feature where views can be quickly toggled to show different perspectives of the same results. 14O.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

The filter tool which is used to refine results from sets of existing results.

The compare tool which allows the user to be able to compare sets of information to find similarities and differences between them, in order to better understand the information presented and to possibly derive other information.

The demarcation tool, which is provided as a utility which allows users to easily distinguish items displayed which are relevant in the current context.

A feature where subsystems such as the search tool, filtering tool and compare tool make use of demarcations to distinguish to the user information they have processed. 141.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

The filter tool which is used to refine results from sets of existing results.

The compare tool which allows the user to be able to compare sets of information to find similarities and differences between them, in order to better understand the information presented and to possibly derive other information. 142.The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising:

The filter tool which is used to refine results from sets of existing results.

143. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 18 or claim 19, further comprising: The compare tool which allows the user to be able to compare sets of information to find similarities and differences between them, in order to better understand the information presented and to possibly derive other information.