Personal Knowledge Management Tools … does it have to be so siloed, and how complicated is it to merge our multiple tools?
Many of us utilize a number of tools to handle the various types of information we capture. We may have a smart phone app to capture photographs, a second app to handle notes, a third that serves as an RSS news reader, and even a fourth for our email, tweets and Facebook data. We also may utilize Good Reads or LibraryThing to manage our books, RefWorks or Zotero to organize our citations and full text materials, and Drive, Dropbox or Diigo to handle our files. Then there are our phone Contacts, our Map locations, our bookmarked favorite URLs, our travel documents, prescription information, and calendars.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to merge these isolated information bits? Especially as we add more and more social media channels to our lives?
We are now starting to see tools that allow various task-specific apps to be linked. For instance, your news reader can download items into your citation manager. Your calendar events could be merged into your ToDo list. Your photographs can be merged into your cloud-based file storage system. The ultimate dream would be to have all these materials searchable using a relational database schema … but we are not quite there yet. The technology may exist already, but we have not developed easy metadata description schema to allow for such complex linkages.
One example of a step in this direction is a tool called “If This Then That.” This tool allows a user to create relationships and connections among knowledge management systems. You can create scripts that will share information across applications and programs. Scripts have been developed for many tools and software products.
This web site will describe a few types of PKM tools by task … and show how ITTT can help you link your tools and merge your data.
PKM tools by Type:
For us to consider as next steps …
Creating a“suite of tools to provide Seamless Linking between Various PKM Tools” … in order to create specific areas for further development.