Today sees the launch of openJean, a community based open source project which aims to develop personal information management software and standards of the highest quality. The project will develop the openJean tool, designed to simplify one of the most basic tasks of information management, storing information in such a way that it can be easily accessed.

OpenJean is a pure Java application which uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for information storage and XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) transformations for additional information display. This means that not only is the openJean code platform independent but so is all the stored information. It is possible to copy or share the openJean directory among different machines, for example Windows, Mac and Linux and expect it to work identically on all of them.

The current release includes the following components (known as catalogs): file manager, RSS aggregator, calendar and appointments diary, email client, image manager, multimedia manager, favorites manager, notes and address book.

Each catalog contains a structure of entities, each of which may have attributes. The attributes of an entity may contain the actual information being stored, or may be references to information stored elsewhere or tags to provide additional information.

The openJean user interface displays one or more catalogs in a left hand pane for navigation and an attribute display panel on the right organized into pages which show the attributes of the entity selected in the open catalog.

Although the openJean catalog component (a derivative of the Java Swing component JTree) appears in the common and well understood tree form, the underlying data model is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph.). OpenJean entities are categories, groups and items, where items cannot have any descendants and groups may not contain categories. The basic principle of openJean is to place items into categories; the nature of the DAG means that items and sub-categories can belong to more than one category.

The category structure of openJean makes it relatively easy to navigate to any particular item. In order to find items that match a specific set of criteria, openJean provides a search mechanism which allows for the construction of arbitrarily complex criteria. These can be saved so that the search can be repeated, and the list of items can be saved as a group or category. When such a group or category is created from the results of a search then any new items added to the catalog later that fit the criteria will automatically be added to that group or category.

Where items need to be categorized according to the value of attributes, then an Index can be created. Within any category the index criteria can be defined in a variety of ways, including the provision of user-written code. A structure of groups will be constructed according to the various values of attributes and all items within the containing category and its sub-categories will be placed into the appropriate index group. Any new items will automatically be placed into the correct index group.

One of the most powerful features of openJean is the ability to cross-reference between catalogs. Where cross-references exist openJean keeps catalogs in step.

OpenJean can be extended by adding user-written Java code in a variety of different ways. For instance, a Java method can be added to the specific catalog menu; it will appear as an item on that menu which when selected calls the method.

From within these methods, or any other Java code, references can be obtained to JEANAPI objects for each catalog which gives access to virtually all openJean information, components and functionality. OpenJean components are derivatives of standard Java components and can easily be built into other applications. Access to user-written code can be through standard Java mechanisms such as the CLASSPATH or by simply placing a jar file into openJean's lib directory where openJean's own class loader will find it.

The openJean project welcomes developers and users who can find more information on www.personalinformationmanagement.org.