Notes about my “exocortex” project.

Idea

The basic idea is kind of nebulous at the moment. I think what I want to make is a combination of:

• Something kind of like Jupyter (though I’ve never used it, so I can’t say)
• A document store with search functionality
• Some sort of system with multiple agents that can be executed from the command line (or perhaps by voice?)

Use Cases

Some of the use cases I have thought about:

Lookup Data

I may take notes about things like when I should trim certain shrubs, when I should overseed my lawn, etc. I would like to be able to store this data with annotations so that I can easily access the data. For instance, I might annotate the values with a key, and annotate the page of notes they are contained in. Then I could, at the command line, asks:

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exo values in lawncare

and it would give me all of the keys available (in case I can’t remember). Then I could ask:

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exo value when-to-plant-grass in lawncare

and it will return the value.

Updating Data

I might take some notes from a website and annotate as described above, but I may want to also annotate the source of the data. It would be good to be able to have that website polled at a given interval to notify me that my notes may need to be updated. Even nicer would be allowing the definition of code which will scrape the data and having it run periodically.

In cases where the data is entered into a document manually (like tracking my weight), I could schedule a reminder to request data to be updated.

Agents

I would like to be able to define some command line arguments or Java code or whatever and annotate it with some kind of label so that it can be called (or perhaps it will be executed periodically). For example, I might want to update my weight in a table, then say:

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exo exec publish-weight-data

in order to build graphs and publish them to a web server.