A terabyte or more of personal storage for an individual's library in the next few years is not only in reach but likely because of new technology and the decreasing costs of mass storage devices.

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by Richard Winterton. Intel Corp.

People are creating, capturing, and storing digital content in ever-increasing quantities. The content varies and covers a wide range of data, from audio and video files, to still images, e-mails, presentations, and a variety of other document types. There are several reasons for the increasing volume of content, but two reasons stand out:

• Performance increase—the continuance of Moore’s Law
• Storage—increasing storage capability and decreasing storage costs

Moore's Law roughly states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months and as a result, the integrated circuits continue to have an exponential increase in computing power. Not only is computing power increasing exponentially but so is mass storage capabilities and capacity. A terabyte or more of personal storage for an individual's library in the next few years is not only in reach but likely because of new technology and the decreasing costs of mass storage devices.

The author Samuel Johnson once said, "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Albert Einstein expressed a similar idea by saying, "Information is not knowledge." Random and unorganized information of this magnitude is unmanageable and may be useless unless you can find it. In order to find information and make use of the information, it has to be managed.

To put into context the massive amount of data a terabyte is, some have estimated that all of the text based content in the Library of Congress would be approximately one terabyte in size. Just imagine how much less valuable that library would be if there were no rhyme or reason to the storing of information in the Library of Congress. Many people, including myself, do not spend the time or have the discipline to organize their digital content in their own personal libraries to make it more useful. Unless you can actually find, organize, and use the content you have, it is useless.

This document takes a different approach to digital content management:

• First, this paper presents different techniques to take advantage of Moore's Law and Intel's multi-core processors using the extra processing capability to help organize digital content in the background.
• Second, it explains and provides a source code example of an information management platform framework that integrates these techniques into a single application that may help organize personal digital content within an application.