LifeLog

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LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to its bid solicitation pamphlet, it was 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 the 'LifeLog' concept was "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] The DARPA program was cancelled in 2004 after criticism from civil libertarians concerning the privacy implications of the system.

Generically, the term "lifelog" or "flog" is used to describe a storage system that with user consent can automatically and persistently record and archive, for access and sharing, all the generated information of a user's or object's life experience in a particular data category.

Thus Google's Gmail, which stores and delivers email in an online, software as a service model, is an example of one of the first online lifelogs available for email; Google Calendar is another.^{[citation needed]} 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 second largest telecommunications company in Japan, KDDI, 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.

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. Today, more primitive offline and online object lifelogs can be found in location-based service, GIS, and other geomatics applications.