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Popcorn: the personal knowledge base

People often use powerful tools to manage the documents they encounter, but very rarely to store the mental knowledge they glean from those documents. Popcorn is a personal knowledge base: an experimental interface and database designed to store and retrieve a user's accumulated personal knowledge. It aims to let the user represent information in a way that corresponds more naturally to their mental conceptions than simply text would, in part by making heavy use of transclusion: sharing items among multiple contexts. This paper describes the design rationale for the system, contrasting it with related efforts, and presents the results of deploying it to a group of volunteers who used it in real-world settings. The results, while revealing some limitations in the tool, and some challenges in coping with knowledge reorganization, suggest that the analysis underlying the design is useful, and that Popcorn is a powerful and effective tool for a variety of intellectual work.