About: Information overload is an everyday part of life-- inboxes overflowing with mail, hundreds of RSS and Twitter feeds, countless contacts across social networks, cell phones, and e-mail address books, etc. There is an urgent need to make sense of all this data to give it structure and meaning. Kaleidoscope is your cloud of knowledge.

Kaleidoscope is a free-form, Unicode-compliant, semantic database that enables a user to store data from various sources. Once in the database, it can be structured, annotated, and linked in any way imaginable. Exchange data with friends through instant messenger and SMS. Extend Kaleidoscope with the platform API written in Python. With a flexible data store API, initial support for BerkeleyDB can be expanded to include any data store including standard SQL databases, Amazon S3, Hadoop HBase, Facebook Data API, Google Spreadsheets, and more. Future features include a small scripting language that is customizable for your language locale, support for additional data formats, and cloud computing/web services. More robust security features (including data tampering detection) will be added soon.

The demo of Kaleidoscope will be an application called Twitterbase. Using your existing Twitter account, you can issue simple commands to your own Kaleidoscope datastore (public section and private section) and register to see how other users are updating their databases.

If you would like to know more about Kaleidoscope, please contact me to setup a demo during the conference. A demo will occur during a BoF session on Thursday evening (more details later).