My interest in personal portable information stores and information predates my use of the approach as a PLE.
I am interested in a computer-based personal assistant and ways in which that could build information to help you throughout your life. Issues of privacy and ownership and location of that information immediately are an issue when that is contemplated. It is clear to me that this means the data must be owned, hosted and controlled by an individual in some way, and ANY access to it approved and logged at the user ownership end. This is WAY WAY different to its being hosted and accesible to Facebook and Google+ (or an Institution like a government, insurance company or teaching organisation).
I liked recently a pointer from Daniel Griffin on the MSc Digital Cultures course on the Diaspora Freedom in Software community (http://diasporafoundation.org/ and https://joindiaspora.com/) and specifically to Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in The Cloud” presentation at NYU Feb 5 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
I was reminded of some discussions I had 20 years ago with telecoms providers about a user centric architecture for use of personal profile information from a computer-based personal assistant. The personal information was served on each request from the user end and with access to information and resources controlled by the user… WAY WAY different to how we have come to use Facebook and Google+ where our data is in their servers and used when they want for their benefit.
Section 3 – The Personal Profile – From http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/tania.pdf
One important feature of the approach to be taken is that the concept of a long lived Personal Profile for communications and information use will be established. It will be a guarantee of the approach that the information that an individual builds in their co-worker personal profile will be able to stand alone and be meaningful outside of its specific use in this particular generation of information agent. We will establish the concept of a separate transportable personal profile that can accompany the user for the rest of his or her life and can grow with him or her.
The TANIA information is also available at this blog post:
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/1995/02/27/tania-task-achieving-network-aware-information-agents/