Knowledge: A Different Approach to a Database on the Desktop

“Desktop applications for ‘Information Management’ that go
beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find.
The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so
a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them
firmly into the public domain.

“The why
‘Idealist’ – a long-discontinued program developed for Windows by
the publishers Blackwell – was taken as a source of inspiration.
This type of software indexes text as it is entered and allows
rapid text searching, making it useful for storing notes and
observations as well as archival information. Users of Idealist
included museums, medical practices for storing patient records,
academics for bibliographic databases, and even by the police for
use in investigations. Nowadays there is specialist commercial
software for many of these purposes, but for individuals who want a
straightforward desktop application for building up databases of
the things that interest them there is little to choose from. This
is despite the fact that libraries for text searching, such as
Xapian and Lucene, are now freely available.”

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