THE SEMANTIC DESKTOP AS A MEANS FOR PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

An inherent problem of the Semantic Web is the provision of a shared vocabulary that is acceptable by many users all of whom having big differences in cultural background, education, role, tasks, and interests. In order to create added value and to convince users of the advantages of the new WWW languages, we focus in a first step on the Semantic Desktop. A Semantic Desktop is a means to manage all personal information across application borders based on Semantic Web standards. Each resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and all data is accessible and queriable as RDF graph. That way, resources from the web can be stored and authored content can be shared with others. Ontologies allow the user to express personal mental models and form the semantic glue interconnecting information and systems. Applications store, read and communicate via ontologies and Semantic Web protocols. The Semantic Desktop is an enlarged supplement to the user's memory assisting users to file, relate, share, and access all digital information like documents, multimedia, and messages through a Personal Information Model (PIMO). This PIMO is build on ontological knowledge generated through user observations and interactions and may be seen as a formal and semi-formal complement of the user's mental models. Thus it reflects experience and typical user behavior and may be processed by a computer in order to provide proactive and adaptive information support or allows personalized semantic search. The Semantic Desktop is built on a middle ware platform allowing to combine information and native applications like the file-system, Mozilla, Thunderbird or MS-Outlook. After talking about typical problems knowledge workers have to solve today, I will introduce the main concepts, components, and functionalities of the Semantic Desktop. Furthermore, I give examples showing how context-adaptive services on the Semantic Desktop may be used for creating socio-technical collaborative intelligence.