Month: January 2007

The word is out there – the german “Technology Review” magazine, a partner of MIT’s technology review, has published an article about the semantic desktop and myself in its februar issue.

If you happen to be in a german-speaking country like Germany, Austria or Switzerland, go to a good bookstore and buy the february 2007 issue. The article sums up my idea of a Semantic Desktop very good, and they also have nice articles on the future of food. The keypoint is, that Semantic Web is a good idea, and Semantic Desktop can help start it.

Gordon Bolduan interviewed me, and I will publish a photo of him interviewing me (which I made) later in February – because I am going on holiday now! see the next post for more…

Did you ever ask yourself why you can’t find anything on your own computer, but can find stuff in the internet? Its the great search engines.

On the desktop, the Nepomuk project is aiming to enhance desktop search with semantic features. So additional to asking “where are these files with ‘money'” you can ask for things related to job offers within the last month.

Sebastian Trüg (whom you may know because you have been using K3B to burn CDs, watch the “about” window of this KDE app) is leading the Semantic Desktop integration for KDE, and he connected us with many other people, for example Jos van den Oever from the Strigi project.

We have set up a wiki page with plans for the future, and will try to integrate RDF search with fulltext search. This would allow a very generic, “technically beautiful” solution to data indexing, RDF is very generic and reusable and fulltext-indexing is quite handy already.

Pray for us, hold your thumbs, if all goes well, we will agree on one standard and desktop search will rock and roll.

Matt Biddulph has published notes on how he connected a hardware knob with a second life parameter. Second Life is a computer world where you can create objects, manipulate them, sell them, within a three-dimensional world. Matt used an arduino board, a kind of electrical device you can plug into a computer and play around with electronics.

Watch the video demo on his weblog.

The direction this is going is exactly what I love: connecting the world of information (secondlife, the web) with the physical world.

Now what I would love to see is to use the Nintendo WII hacked, so that I can use the WII wireless controller to get the Secondlife stuff moving.

It seems this hack is still to be done, but this video gives a light impression of what I mean:

The guys from zedomax.com have used a CUBLOC controller to create a Joystick USB device for a PC. But not a joystick, a six-axis-of-freedom-controller. The glue is some basic code on a basic controller.

People from the W3C SWEO group are wondering if anybody from the Semantic Web is giving a demo or talk at the XTech 2007 conference in France.

Are you on the XTech, presenting Semantic Web? If yes, please contact me (leo.sauermann@dfki.de) or Susie Stephens (susie.stephens@oracle.com), we want to help people find tutorial material and collect useful presentations on the Semantic Web.

Btw, The goal of the SWEO is to develop strategies and materials to increase awareness among the Web community of the need and benefit for the Semantic Web, and educate the Web community regarding related solutions and technologies.