Haystack is a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 to research and develop several applications around personal information management

Personal information management

Personal information management refers to the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents , web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks and fulfill a person’s various...

 and the Semantic Web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

. The most notable of those applications is the Haystack client, a research personal information manager (PIM) and one of the first to be based on semantic desktop

Semantic desktop

In computer science, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a...

 technologies. The Haystack client is published as open source software under the BSD license. It's developed in a RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

-aware dynamic language, Adenine

Adenine (programming language)

Adenine, named after the nucleobase adenine, is a script language, which is developed in the context of the Haystack project and the Oxygen project of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in collaboration with NTT....

, built for this project on top of Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

.

Similar to the Chandler

Chandler (PIM)

Chandler is a personal information management software suite described by its developers as a "Note-to-Self Organizer" designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. It is free software, previously released under the GNU General Public License, and now released under the...

 PIM, the Haystack system unifies handling different types of unstructured information. This information has a common representation in RDF that is presented to users in a configurable human-readable way.

See also

• SIMILE
  SIMILE
  SIMILE is a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium , Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation...
  
  
• Chandler (PIM)
  Chandler (PIM)
  Chandler is a personal information management software suite described by its developers as a "Note-to-Self Organizer" designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. It is free software, previously released under the GNU General Public License, and now released under the...
  
  
• Semantic desktop
  Semantic desktop
  In computer science, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a...
  
  
• Strigi
  Strigi
  Strigi is a desktop search daemon, which is operating system-independent and desktop-independent. Strigi was initiated by Jos van den Oever. Strigi's goals are to be fast, use a small amount of RAM, and use flexible backends and plug-ins. A benchmark as of January 2007 showed that Strigi is faster...
  
  
• Beagle (software)
  Beagle (software)
  Beagle is a search system for Linux and other such modern Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, and Windows Search or Google Desktop under Linux or Microsoft Windows...
  
  

External links

• Haystack Project webpage
• Haystack at the SIMILE project webpage
• Haystack Firefox Browser History Obfuscation Plugin