Month: December 2008

My ISWC Talk about long-term Semantic Desktop evaluation is available for online viewing:

Evaluating long-term use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM

I still have to improve and get rid of the many “ah”s and “uhm”s.

Paper at Springer

Germany is funding the major project THESEUS to work on the internet of the future, many things are Semantic Web and Web 3.0.

I just stumbled upon a video about the TEXT use case, a sub-part of the project.

watch:
http://www.sap-tv.com/video.php?a=3261&l=1

Part of the video is also Stefan Wess, CEO of Empolis, with whom we cooperate in Eclipse SMILA (smila is the semantic indexing part of Theseus where aperture is used, thats how I stumbled to the video).

When the Technology Review Article appeared today morning, the pipes were already heating up and it was dugg and twined. We already bet that we will be slashdotted and Gunnar wrote a small reminder that “nepomuk may kill MacOs” on the download page.

and, this minute Michael Sintek noted that we were slashdotted:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F16%2F1546219&from=rss

“Technology Review has a story looking at Nepomuk — the semantic tool that is bundled with the latest version of KDE. It seems that some Semantic Web researchers believe the tool will prove a breakthrough for semantic technology. By encouraging people to add semantic meta-data to the information stored on their machines they hope it could succeed where other semantic tools have failed.”

Horray, the first slashdotting that I experience on something where I contributed. May more come.

Technology Review wrote a short article about NEPOMUK:

Semantic Sense for the Desktop A project brings Semantic Web technology to personal documents.

“This might be the semantic desktop that actually survives,” says Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, a semantic bookmarking and social-networking service. “There’s a lot of potential to build on what they’ve done.”

The idea of a semantic desktop is not new. The Open Source Applications Foundation and SRI, two nonprofit organizations, have both worked on similar projects. But previous efforts have suffered from the difficulty of generating good semantic information: for semantic software to be useful, semantic information needs to be generated and tagged to files and documents. But without useful applications in the first place, it is hard to persuade users to generate and tag this data themselves.

Nepomuk is distinguished by a more practical vision, says Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of knowledge management research at DFKI. The software adds a lot of semantic information automatically and encourages users to add more by making annotated data more useful. It also provides an easy way to share tagged information with others.

wow. I failed to resize a bloody 3D diagram in excel, and googling for “excel 3d line axis length” added another distraction from my PhD,
behold the power of Excel’s 3d gaming engine.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php?print=1

“Integration of computer games and spreadsheets has tightened during the evolution of computer technology.

At an early stage this integration among the the games and spreadsheets was comical, e.g. they were installed on the same hard disk, or the purchased games were listed in an Excel sheet. Later the integration has tightened, as some games introduced a built-in spreadsheet (accessible by the “boss key” feature) – or Excel contained some built-in 3D games as Easter Eggs.

Now we have arrived at the next step of this integration, as Excel’s cutting-edge 3D functionality is not hidden in Easter Eggs anymore but can be accessible publicly and easily. Excel has grown up and started its conquest as a revolutionary 3D game engine.”

—

Tom Heath recently wrote about RDF Browsers in the IEEE Internet Computing Journal.

It’s at the level of “things” that browsers for the Web of data should operate. Providing simple browsers for RDF triples, and the documents in which they’re published, is one option for enabling people to interact with this information space. We saw this trend with some of the earliest Semantic Web browsers, but it rather misses the point. The one-page-at-a-time style of browsing, which we know well from the Web of documents, would make nothing of the potential we now have for integrated views of data assembled from numerous locations.

Right, I agree.
The core class in OWL and PIMO is called Thing for a reason.
Also this reminds me of our user interface abstractions used on the semantic desktop:

Which we published in Leo Sauermann, Ansgar Bernardi, Andreas Dengel: Overview and Outlook on the Semantic Desktop. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on The Semantic Desktop at the ISWC 2005 Conference. http:// CEUR-WS.org/Vol-175/.

Ah, the word spreads. Excellent:

In the Semantic Web realm, dereferencable URIs offer the critical fabric that drive the giant global graph of interconnected data popularly referred to as Linked Data; a term also coined by Tim Berners-Lee in his Linked Data Design Note[1] and furthered by other articles such as “Cool URIs for the Semantic Web” by Sauermann and Cygniak[2].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dereferenceable_Uniform_Resource_Identifier

So, I hope the URI crisis is over now, lets see how it turns out in the next years.

CORDIS, a page managed by the EU, hosts an article about the results of the NEPOMUK project. Again, Ansgar Bernardi gave a great interview and brought it to the point.

Semantic desktop paves the way for the semantic web

“For example, I was taking notes at a summer school we recently held in Malta and I was writing the information into a wiki application on my computer. With Nepomuk installed, each time I mentioned a speaker’s name I was given the opportunity to link to contact details and other data about that person I already had stored on the computer,” Bernardi, a researcher at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), explains.

And the ancient myths of NEPOMUK, tales of the past that are worth passed on 🙂
“The idea of building a semantic desktop arose from the fact that one of our colleagues could not keep track of the girlfriends of his friends because they kept changing,” Bernardi says. “Social networking sites such as Facebook only go half way towards solving the problem because they do not provide an actual assessment of relations between people based on all the information available to you and your interpretation of it… Much of that information is hidden on your computer in files, emails, contact books, pictures, in the names and structures of your folders. Nepomuk provides a more efficient way of managing that information.”

Well, recently I drank a beer with the friend who had so many girlfriends and it appeared that he also kept forgetting his girlfriend’s names…

One spin-off company from coordinating partner DFKI is in the process of being established, and Bernardi says others may follow.
Ha, thats me!