Just a thought I wanted to share: have you ever been frustrated of not being able to bookmark a file of your computer on delicious? …to find the URL of a file (e.g. an image) you downloaded, in order to share this URL instead of sending the file? … or event to be able to work seamlessly on any document from any computer, with or without installed software? and I won’t even talk about synchronization of files between people, computers and devices… (is that the actual last version of the document?)

If feel so, you’re just like me! Wouldn’t it be nice that we only work with URLs instead of OS-specific and computer-specific local file paths? That way we could leverage thousands of cutting-edge tools available on the internet, in order to better manage, annotate, visualize, share and thus better browse through information!

Of course putting everything on the internet is scary because we’re not always online, and because some stuff sometimes disappear from the web (e.g. older versions of software which are not free anymore)… But what if we “cache” our web-stored information on our computers instead, and assume that the web-hosted version is the reference of the resources (with an Unique Resource Identifier… URI!). This URI could lead to several hosting spaces, including private storage (e.g. computers, devices, portable hard drives), that would keep synchronized.

I promise that, if such a system exists (and works well of course), I would never have to keep downloaded research papers on my computer any longer! :-)