MIT AI: Haystack

Haystack

1. Genericity. Haystack incorporates and exposes all types of information in a single, coherent manner. It provides a single, uniform interface for manipulation of e-mail, instant messages, addresses, web pages, documents, news, bibliographies, annotations, music, images, etc.
2. Flexibility. The data types Haystack understands are not hard-wired; any additional types of information that a user wants to work with can be easily incorporated. The user can readily define new object attributes that help them categorize and retrieve information, and new relationships between objects. Rather than being tacked-on afterthoughts, user-defined attributes and relationships are given the same centrality in the interface as built-in relationships such as “author” and “date.”
3. User-Object Orientedness. Haystack breaks down the artificial barriers created by giving distinct applications responsibility for different data types. Instead, Haystack attempts to match a user’s own focus on objects in view and what can be done with them. An operation (such as spellchecking, sending an e-mail message, or rotating an image) can be invoked at any time on any object for which the operation “makes sense” (i.e. a blob of text, a person, or an image respectively). New operations can easily be downloaded into the system and immediately become visible in all contexts where they apply. Operations are themselves first-class information objects in Haystack; like all other objects they can be categorized, annotated, and searched for.

I have to admit I find this concept fascinating.