Agenda: a personal information manager

Abstract

The free-form, evolving, personal information that people deal with in the course of their daily activities requires more flexible data structures and data management systems than tabular data structures provide. A tool for managing personal information must conveniently handle freetextual data; allow for structure to evolve gracefully as the database grows; represent unnormalized data; and support data entry through database views . We have designed a new type of database that serves these needs—“item/category” database—and realized this design in a commercial personal computer software product named “Agenda.”