The Semantic Desktop – Next Generation Information Management & Collaboration Infrastructure. Proc. of Semantic Desktop Workshop at the ISWC, Galway, Ireland

The Semantic Desktop – Next Generation Information Management & Collaboration Infrastructure. Proc. of Semantic Desktop Workshop at the ISWC, Galway, Ireland

Conference Report

Abstract:: The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we com- municate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insuﬃcient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single ﬁle to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing eﬀort of ﬁltering and organizing this ﬁle times the number of recipients—leading to more and more of peoples’ time going into information ﬁltering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more ﬁne-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries be- tween personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standard means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of SemanticWeb technologies on personal computers. The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the Web beyond sending emails. The vision of the Semantic Desktop for personal information management and collaboration has been around for a long time: visionaries like Vanevar Bush and Doug Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these ideas. However, for the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long since the foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality were not yet invented—these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest of the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle.

Keywords:: Semantic Desktop

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