I've been toying with a topic for a couple months and thought some of you may have some insights you'd be wiling to share. The topic is information systems for home (or home portal). The idea is that more and more of our home life is a collection of digital content and information that needs to be managed. A brief list

• Bill paying
• Address Book
• Digital Media
• Calendar
• Knowledge Base
• more...

Looking down the list, each of these items is managed by a different piece of software with a different interface and different access controls, support and backup requirements.

I'm wondering if there could exist a framework or common platform that attempts to bring the pieces of our digital existence into single, coherent system.

I'm looking for your thoughts, current solutions, issues, etc

IMHO, the framework is called "OS" and is Linux. As for the consistency between applications, this is called "Human Interface Guidelines".

I know an OS is very versatile, and may not look like you want... at first sight. Try and search for things like "kiosk".

For example, you could achieve what you want with the Matchbox windowmanager, along with a launcher for each task (Matchbox' launchers can bring to the front if already launched). And only use Gnome-compliant applications, that are strictly following the accessibility and GUI guidelines.

Now, I understand that's not the answer you were looking for. But appart from that, I think you're better off with MythTV- or PHPGroupware-like applications, along with all their plugins.

Yves.

Sure, the guidelines are nice but you use software and know there is little consistency among unrelated packages either in task completion or terminology. Maybe I should have added 'web-based' as I think a good portal framework like PHPGroupWare or PHPNuke would be a good combine everything without getting into platform dependency

I'll look into MythTV. I already use a TikiWiki, Gallery, WebCalendar, but haven't taken the time to integrate them.

Good comments