oheric.com

I hate the boxes of paper records I have to lug around.

Some of the types of documents in my life:

• Records of:
  • Financial transactions
  • Taxes
  • Contracts
  • Business cards
  • Academic certificates
• Papers I’ve written
  • Math
  • Creative writing

My goal is to put all my documents (paper and digital) into a single cross-referenced document management system with flexible metadata. Eric Blue recommends SCAN. From what I see, it looks simple and highly useful! I may start using this system and then convert to something else (probably a custom system based on RDF). I just purchased a nice scanner, so I’m going to implement this right away!

This fits into a larger goal of creating a unified model of all the entities I interact with, across all media.

Paper → Image → PDF → SCAN metadata store

Microcontent can be easily transferred between infosystems. Simpler data formats are simply more portable.

By organizing your information as microcontent, you can easily implement various distributed workflows, including

• local checkout of individual items
• consolidation (aggregation)

As the device market gets more complicated, .NET and Java propose to achieve portability through homogeneity, but the browser remains the single (somewhat) universally available client platform. The key difference is that the web grew around portable data formats, not portable code.