My thought process will follow Ben Shneiderman’s Visual Information Seeking Mantra of:

“Overview First, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand“.

In this post, I am going to brainstorm the types of data that I will be using and in future posts, take each section and break it down.

Calendar data - Time-based with various events/appointments generally falling into three type of categories:

• Time-specific – ex. Doc Appt
• All day – ex. Birthday
• Span/range – ex. Vacation

To-do lists or tasks -  Can or cannot be time based and can fall into two type of categories:

• Deadline
• Ongoing

Personal data – Data that you want to use for your own reference so that you can see patterns.  Some examples:

• Sick/Illness – ex. Flu in November and Sinus Infection in December
• Car maintenance
• Moods
• Food diary

Social data – Data from social sites. Some examples are:

• Blogs
• Photos
• Bookmarks

Other data – Data that doesn’t fall in the above categories, but I think it will be interesting to see how it meshes with the other data.  Examples:

• Weather
• News events
• Pop culture
• Historic events

The next post, I will do some deeper brainstorming into the Calendar data.