Researching PIM/PKM Perfection

Posted by epistasis

Nov 23 2011

Introduction

I’ve recently started using MediaWiki [1] as a ‘Personal Wiki’ to contain my thoughts and important information that I may need to recall at some point in the future (guides, note fragments, etc). I’ve added the Semantic MediaWiki [2] extension to make the content more searchable and so on. I plan to write my own extension called MediaWikiPIM which will sync Contacts & Calendar data into the wiki from my Google account. This will allow me to keep all my data archived in my wiki and search it etc.

Document Management

The next thing I have started to look at is Document Management [3]. Obviously MediaWiki itself supports file uploads, and file versioning would be built in – but I cannot tag the files (for example using Semantic MediaWiki) or search their contents (or even their comments). My research has led me to solutions such as Alfresco [4], OpenDocMan [5] and DocMGR [6]. Out of these, DocMGR seems to fit my requirements the most – but would need some work in integrating it with MediaWiki. The whole idea is that I can get at all my information from a single interface and data fragmentation (i.e. different types of data being stored all over the place) is minimised.

I came across some really interesting blog posts from people who were researching into the same area as me. Michael Ridley [7] seems to have decided to use MediaWiki itself for document management, whereas Eric Blue has gone for combination of ‘roll your own’ [8] and a third-party application called Scan [9].

Really, I’m looking for people to share their experiences and suggest things I haven’t thought of. For the moment though, I’m going to continue into my research and I will post a follow-up at some point in the future.