LifeLog

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LifeLog is a project of the Information Processing Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to its bid solicitation pamphlet, is to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this 'LifeLog' concept is to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships."

LifeLog aims to compile a massive electronic database of every activity and relationship a person engages in. This is to include credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via wearable GPS sensors, biomedical data captured through wearable sensors, The high level goal of this data logging is to identify "preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality." [1]

[edit] Other uses of the term

"Lifelog" is also a generic term that describes a storage system that can record with consent, for persistent access, retrieval, and potential sharing, all the generated information of a user's or object's life experience, for a particular data category. Google's Gmail is arguably the first mass-accessible user lifelog for email. Commercial user lifelogs for various other data (websites visited, audio, video, GPS coordinates) have been developed as research projects and for corporate and security applications, but few are available to the general public at present. The No. 2 telco in Japan, KDDI Corp, has developed the Lifelog Pod, software that keeps track of every user action (photos, searches, MP3 listens, software runs) made through a cellphone or computer, extending one's searchable memory into even the minor details of their online history and allowing easy sharing of that data with friends.

With time and decreasing storage costs, user lifelogs may continue to proliferate, and will generate new privacy, liability and security concerns.

Bruce Sterling's concept of a spime, a physical world object whose life history is trackable in space and time, is an example of a lifelog for physical objects. Such object lifelogs are in extensive use in location-based service, GIS, and other geomatics applications.