Remembering and Forgetting for Personal Preservation

Chapter 1 detailed the need for preservation especially for our personal life. Even so, it is not part of most users’ regular practice. Preservation challenges users with a manual effort and a somewhat stern discipline to continuously perform the required steps. Being aware of these challenges, the chapter will present the novel approach realized in ForgetIT to embed support for personal preservation in users’ daily activities of Personal Information Management (PIM), reducing the effort and users’ cognitive burden for preservation. In this approach, the previously introduced concepts of remembering and forgetting play a major role for a successful realization and for providing benefits to users. It is a method rooted in artificial intelligence research that allows us to derive and represent a user’s mental model and making data machine understandable. This “semantification” of the user’s resources paves the way for more effective functionalities for automated preservation, forgetting, and remembering embedded in the user’s daily activities and applications. The chapter will detail a pilot based on this ForgetIT approach realizing remembering and forgetting for preservation. We further investigate how activities from PIM provide context to these. Regarding remembering, we present applications allowing a semantic photo organization and providing a self-generating diary to remember past events. Considering forgetting, we investigate how forgetting functionalities can be embedded in applications and present how different variants for forgetting are used in the pilot. Finally, a comprehensive approach for personal preservation is presented utilizing the PoF Framework introduced in Chap. 6 and overcoming the obstacles for personal preservation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of experience of using the pilot in daily work of our research group.