Personal data integration (part 1)

I’ve been toying with the idea of attempting “semantic integration” of a lot of personal data in my life. I’ll be sure to share more later, but so far I’ve managed to pull together my September phone records, my email history, my contacts, my calendar and my Facebook friends (via the API, not something sketchy!) into a single triple-store.

Using this data, I was able to create this chart, which shows my friend network (I have removed myself and Brooke, since we’re connected to everyone and it ruins the layout). The people who I emailed, texted or called in September are shown in green.

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You can see tight clusters of my friend groups. The tightest is the big hairball near the bottom that makes up much of Brooke’s Stanford GSB class, but also clear are groupings for my friends from MIT, Chapel Hill, Boston (post-MIT return), my San Francisco tech friends and my family. My family is the only group that is isolated from the rest of the graph — everyone else is connected, which is partly because I’ve introduced some of these groups to each other, and partly just because it’s a small world.

Also good to see is that almost every cluster has at least one green node (my family notably doesn’t, but that’s because my parents aren’t on Facebook), so I’ve generally done a good job of keeping in touch with at least a few people from different phases of my life.

There’s a lot of talk about breaking the silos in the enterprise and, in the semantic-web community, data integration across the entire web. But right now, people don’t even have decent integration across their own personal information. The current proliferation of single-feature applications encourages you to store different aspects of your life in different places — the advantage of course, is that something highly specialized is much more pleasant to use, but the disadvantage is that there’s no way to query across these aspects. I’m interested in experimenting with ways that help people “break the silos” with their own information, in the hope that this will both yield useful applications and help us get a better grip on the bigger problems.

I now have code to keep my triple-store synced with my friend network, my contacts, my phone records, my email and my calendar. I can construct queries across all of this (who did I forget to call on their birthday? Who have I seen recently who went to Stanford?). I’ll be sharing this code at some point, but I want to see how far I can take this. I’m also interested in hearing from anyone who has tried similar experiments and wants to collaborate.

So, anyone have any thoughts on other sources of personal data or questions you might want to ask once it’s integrated?