Whatever happened to the Semantic Web? What chance have I missed with the Semantic Desktop?

This article “Whatever happened to te Semantic Web?” about the failure of the Semantic Web is interesting. I may note that my personal failure to realize the semantic desktop – an end user application to use data from the semantic web for personal information management – contributed to the overall fail.

Continue reading “Whatever happened to the Semantic Web? What chance have I missed with the Semantic Desktop?”

Personal Linked Data, Personal Knowledge Graph

What we need is a personal app that allows us to link our own data. An app where I can link projects to related appointments, people, things, documents/files, and notes. And all of these with each other. And tag everything.

It could be easy to build it on top of NextCloud or on top of Google Documents. It could be done based on my work about the “Semantic Desktop” or “NEPOMUK“.  The concepts I developed back then would still apply today. And all the research others and I did in the wake of NEPOMK would also still apply.

I would call it “Personal Linked Data” or “Personal Knowledge Graph”. Not even TimBl himself calls it “Semantic Web” these days, but rather “Linked Data”.

And to illustrate that blogpost here, I take the cover of my phd. Lookit, its SVG:

application integration the localhost way

Browsing along the PlanetRDF I came to Danny Ayers site which led me to the Syndication Subscription Service.

This is a good example of how localhost integration works. It shows 15 popular news-aggregation systems and provides links that enable the user to add Danny’s blog to their newsreader. Interesting is, that there si no common way of doing this: There is no “add this rss feed to my newsreader” system call in the operating system or the browser.
All products implement different ways to do it. The locally instlalled systems open http ports at the locahlost and wait for http requests. The web based systems run on their servers (f.e. yahoo) and wait for the commando there.

public calendars

coordinating my appointments with someone else is hard enough.

Some offer solution.

http://icalshare.com/ – public iCalendar files

http://www.eventsherpa.com/ – proprietary calendaring application that is iCal based. They want you to host your calendar on their site. Which is also ok.

I also looked on MozCal’s calendar sharing ability and thought about using KDE’s KOrganzizer. The two didn’t agree on the same iCal lingo so I have to wait for newer versions.

Nice things for gnowsis

I stumbled across some nice features I could use for www.gnowsis.com.

Features like Samsung contact. They are also on Freshmeat.

This leads to the question: Is it feasible to implement an Open Source MAPI interface? By doing this, we could fool Outlook into storing its information on a RDF store, perhaps server based.
otlkcon tries to do it.

Bynari Insight Connector is the “bring two good ideas together” approach. It uses an IMAP server as a storage device to host MS-Outlook data. That is plain GREAT. It implements MAPI and fools Outlook into storing all its data into Bynari. Bynari then forwards everything to IMAP. Don’t wanna know what tweaks they did on the IMAP side, anyhow.