Year: 2009

I have been tracking everything “semantic desktop” for the last years, but this beauty has evaded me until now. disclaimer: this may not help much to explain the ideas, and is a bit long, but the mystic sound and nice appeal make it mesemerizing to watch – if you can, enjoy this in a relaxing atmosphere….

Here’s an animation I did a few years ago to explain the idea of the “social semantic desktop”, using Lego visualisations I made in the LDraw CAD package. Music is by yours truly from http://johnbreslin.com/wiki/index.php...

If you are interested in my PhD, you can now buy it on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.de/Semantic-approach-Personal-Information-Management/dp/3866244495/

as blogged before, I finished and published my PhD. Its a good reference on all topics related to the semantic desktop: personal information management, information extraction, pimo, application plugins, semantic wikis, and how people used them.

Now, my work did hit the Amazon store and can be bought by you together with other interesting books such as Founders At Work

P.s.: Disclaimer: If you buy it through the links on this page, you support me, I took this opportunity to join Amazon’s affiliate program 😉

As I just also blogged on OSCAF. I will be there, see that you can join also.

Sebastian Trüg from NEPOMUK-KDE organises a social semantic desktop workshop, a practical meeting to bring pragmatic implementers together.

After the first Nepomuk workshop in June being a great success it is time
to start the planning for the next one. In fact there will be two workshops
before the end of the year: one dedicated to the open social semantic desktop
and one general Nepomuk hands-on coding sprint for everyone interested in
Nepomuk development.

The Nepomuk Open Social Semantic Desktop

techbase.kde.org/Projects/Nepomuk/OpenSocialSemanticDesktopWorkshop2009

This workshop will be focused on the discussion of social features in Nepomuk
and the integration with platforms such as OpenDesktop.

Today Nepomuk allows to handle local resources and data can not be exchanged
with other users. The next step needs to be the integration of such
functionality. It needs to be possible to define privacy parameters on Nepomuk
information, to share Nepomuk data with other users, to integrate information
from online sources, and to enrich online data with the information stored in
Nepomuk.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts from the semantic
desktop and ontology design as well as those from online services and peer to
peer communication. Together the theoretical (and hopefully also
technological) basis for an open social semantic desktop in KDE will be
created.

Important projects related to this topic include Telepathy, Kopete,
OpenDesktop, Silk, and OSCAF, the new desktop ontology project.

The workshop will take place in Freiburg, Germany again (it is just so
convenient for me 😉

If you are interested in participating please add your name, email address,
and the dates that are convenient for you to the Workshop wiki page.

Be aware that the e.V. is sponsoring the event for both travel and
accommodation expenses.

I am looking forward to seeing you in Freiburg.

Regards,
Sebastian Trueg

In October 2006 I started blogging about my PhD, here the aftermath: it is published!

Get your PDF version or printed version directly from the publisher:

http://www.dissertation.de/buch.php3?buch=5954

The ISBN Number is 978-3-86624-449-8

The bibtex is online at bibsonomy:
http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/22b669dcf81fefda8ba233ded900aec9d/leobard

An online version is available here:
http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/papers/Sauermann2009phd.pdf

Alas, now you can finally cite it and it is free to take its place in science.
and I am free, too…

Working at DFKI is awesome, and now there is a video showing the work done by Marcus Liwicki to bring touch-tables and collaborative work to the next level. This is a peak outcome by the people from our km group, led by Professor Andreas Dengel. Saher El-Neklawy did part of the programming, many people contributed here.

Others say:
if you’ve ever had to sit down with people at the collaboration table, I think you’ll recognize how well this system matches that experience. I really appreciate the approach they’ve taken, and I look forward to seeing where else it will go.

Our website says:
The touch&write pen-abled interactive touchtable combines infrared technology for the normal touching and moving with the digital pen technology for high resolution handwriting. This allows an intuitive switch between the modes object manipulation, and content editing.

Touch & Write is an innovative new platform for creating applications, that users find natural to use. It seamlessly integrates the paper world into the digital world. Editing, arranging and writing tasks can be easily performed in an intuitive way.

The construction of Touch & Write as a table top environment encourages collaborative settings. Users surround the table, discuss their ideas and work together. Since intuitive handwriting is allowed as an input metaphor, the creativity is furthermore supported.

Some of the shown parts in the demo are based on technology connected to things we do in the semantic part of DFKI, our department is a really nice environment to work in 😉

The co-located Akademy/KDE and GUADEC/GNOME “desktop summit” is over, and various bloggers report about the outcome. pro-linux news. Sebastian Trüg witnesses joint conference.

A summary statement on the KDE blogs by Richard Moore reports that NEPOMUK and the Semantic Desktop are key elements to build upon (also mentioning it before the new GUI) and distinguish the KDE desktop from others. During his keynote, Sebastian Kügler, board member of KDE Ev, announced that more funding will go into the Semantic Desktop area:
KDE e.V. will sponsor a series of developer meetings that focus on integrating these features into the desktop. We invite teams inside KDE to think about how their software can benefit from the semantic framework introduced in KDE 4. The semantic desktop has the potential of being a game-changer for the Free Desktop, as it provides a way to model the user’s data closer to how the human brain does it. It will move the computer’s user interface one step closer to the user. (copied from Richard Moore’s post, I cannot cross-check if Sebastian really said that)

Most apparent and important for me: gnome and KDE people work in parallel, but with closer and closer cooperation. An interesting aspect on this merge and cooperation is our contribution from the Semantic Desktop side:
KDE’s strigi library is getting closer to gnome’s tracker. As Sebastian Trüg writes, tracker is now using RDF and sparql.

As a common ground, developers from both projects agreed in April on using the NEPOMUK ontologies, and this will for cooperation grew and grew since then. I am helping a bit from the side of www.oscaf.org, an organization that was founded as a place for standardization work by DERI, DFKI, and KDE. There I represent DFKI, and we had to rethink our process a lot to cater for the needs of open-source projects.

So, I am watching open-mouthed at how ontologies really help building a common model between domain experts (horrayy, they work) and cannot imagine what will happen soon in the KDE/Gnome community around NEPOMUK. I really can’t, because with these many brains who now cooperate, innovation is speeding up by the minute, and its not predictable anymore what semantic desktop applications will be there in a year. Looking forward to it, though 🙂