Managing disparate personal datasets of different scopes.

I started thinking about this when trying to solve the problem posed by synchronization of PI data between devices/applications with different field sets (kdepimpi being the implementation focus)

KDE PIM/PI - Kool Desktop Environment Personal Information Manager / Platform Independent - (hello mouthful) uses a tag system for phone numbers, but it could be applied to any repetitive data (email addresses, things like that).

Several solutions appear obvious, each with a different set and advantages and constraints, and they allow us to discover the specific set of issues we have to deal with.

• Making fields static and numbered (work phone #1, etc) would allow very easy mapping to a narrower data set (Outlook allowing only so many phones numbers, you only synch the first one), but you're loosing information, and you should alert the user to that.

• We can smarten up the application so that it'll be able to determine which fields must be synced, and that allows us to conserve the tag system, but we run into the same info-loss problem. hate hate.

• Smaller/dumber devices like mobile phones are more of a worry in the sense that they only manage a very limited amount of data about contacts (it's only a phone, right?), but that's set to change as they get better, and more integrated (oh so now it's an email client and e-agenda as well... great).
  

Palm handhelds can have several items of the same type and name (work, mobile, email, whatever) but I don't know how Hotsync determines which one to insert in a more limited dataset (Outlook, or any other app you're syncing to). I don't know if there's a limit to the number of entries of the same type you can have for the same contact, either.

So the core issue seems to be that you need to sync a limited amout of contact information while maintaining usability and proper user feedback. More on that later.