Corporate and Personal Use of the Personal Digital Index

• Corporate Use
• Personal Use

Corporate Users

Sharing indexes means that if your colleague has read a particular web site or set of documents then they can be included in any searches you want to do by sharing each other’s indexes. Colleagues can create shared work areas for projects and bulletin-boards.

Possibly more importantly, a significant portion of ‘institutional’ knowledge lies in the corporate email system: We envisage that emails will be an integral part of your Personal Digital Index.

Although we see collaboration as being extremely useful, it should not be implemented at the cost of privacy. The system is arranged so that you will be able set the access controls for others to view your public index. In a corporate environment, employees are increasingly being offered incentives to put their personal information on the corporate database. With the Personal Digital Index, making such information available to others is a very simple process. It also enables employers to receive notifications as to which employees are collaborating effectively.

It is possible to set up an arrangement to access colleagues’ information even when they’re not in the office.

Individual (Personal) Users

Individuals may want to share portions of their Personal Digital Index with friends or relatives.

For example: if you’ve researched a holiday on-line and a friend wants to go to the same holiday destination, it would save them a lot of wasted time if they could search all the websites that you had browsed.

As the use of the Personal Digital Index becomes more ubiquitous, we envisage that home users will increasingly start to use the collaboration function – the incentive of course is extending their own search scope based on the fact they trust their friends to filter information. Instead of searching the web now they’re searching stuff that somebody else whom they trust has pre-filtered for junk.