A Lifelog Management System Based on the Relational Data Model and its Applications

As the cost of disks decreases, PCs are soon expected to be equipped with a disk of 1TB or more. Assuming that a single person generates 1GB of data per month, 1TB is enough to store data for the entire lifetime of a person. This has lead to the growth of researches on lifelog management, which manages what people see and listen to in everyday life. Although many different lifelog management systems have been proposed, including those based on the relational data model, based on ontology, and based on file systems, they have all advantages and disadvantages: Those based on the relational data model provide good query processing performance but they do not support complex queries properly; Those based on ontology handle more complex queries but their performances are not satisfactory: Those based on file systems support only keyword queries. Moreover, these systems are lack of support for lifelog group management and do not provide a convenient user interface for modifying and adding tags (metadata) to lifelogs for effective lifelog search. To address these problems, we propose a lifelog management system based on the relational data model. The proposed system models lifelogs by using the relational data model and transforms queries on lifelogs into SQL statements, which results in good query processing performance. It also supports a simplified relationship query that finds a lifelog based on other lifelogs directly related to it, to overcome the disadvantage of not supporting complex queries properly. In addition, the proposed system supports for the management of lifelog groups by providing ways to create, edit, search, play, and share them. Finally, it is equipped with a tagging tool that helps the user to modify and add tags conveniently through the ion of various tags. This paper describes the design and implementation of the proposed system and its various applications.