And … is fragmentation necessarily bad? Over the years, several prototypes have explored variations on a theme of information unification: let all information items be of the same basic form—all able to be manipulated in the same basic ways.15 For example, Haystack represents an effort to provide a unified data environment in which it is possible to group, annotate, and reference or link information at smaller and more meaningful units than the file. In the Haystack data model, a typical document is actually an assembly of many individual information objects. Larger objects can be assembled from small objects as needed, and objects can be dynamically assembled into any number of collections. An email inbox, for example, is just another collection of special “email message” objects.

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too often, our information is partitioned not for our convenience, but for the convenience of tools narrowly focused on a particular function such as note taking or the management of “tunes.” We then have trouble grouping documents, photographs, notes, music, and email together according to a larger task or project for which this information is needed. In some cases, we have little reasonable alternative but to use the interface provided by a specific tool as our means of manipulating any of the items created through this tool. This is the case, for example, in the use of Apple iTunes, Microsoft OneNote, or most email applications. Each of these applications defines special forms of information (e.g., songs, notes, email messages). The information items of a form cannot be easily manipulated other than through the application that supports this form.