Category: SemWeb

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!

Tomorrow I will be giving a talk at TU-Wien about: The Semantic Desktop – a new hope for Personal Information Management.

The presentations take place on 1st December 2008 from 17:00-19:00 in the Seminarraum Zemanek, Favoritenstrasse 9-11 (1040 Vienna), ground floor. The nearest underground station is U1 Taubstummengasse.

As usualy, there are mozartballs and time for questions, please come in masses, if possible, manic.

Abstract:
With today’s operating systems it is possible to store a file to a folder, but not to a project or a person. Applications do not share concepts of persons or projects. In the Semantic Web effort, the W3C has proposed standards for the management of metadata.
This talk is about a merge of Semantic Web and Personal Computers resulting in the Semantic Desktop. Existing data sources are adapted to RDF, enabling integration across applications. Different projects aim at implementing the new paradigm, in the talk the open source frameworks published by the NEPOMUK project are presented.

Rainer Wasserfuhr talks about philosophy/new technology, in this episode of PieschenTv his mind circles around Semantic Web and Kissology.

German/in Deutsch.

10 minutes.

The part on kissing is at minute 7:00.

He wants to work on kissology and a semantic representation of kisses. Problems are privacy and the border between private / public sphere of kissing. In a time where everything goes public, can we only kiss people who are willing to upload the facts about it?

Keep on

Today, our Aperture project has had the 10.000th download!

Three and a half years after starting it, its alive and prospering!

Thanks to all the users who downloaded it, thanks to sourceforge for hosting it and great kudos to all the contributors in the team!

I am getting invitation after invitation for naymz.com. Now, what do they do that is related to us?

It is a web 2.0 application similar to facebook or linkedin, giving you the opportunity to manage a social network and get a good-googleable personal website. It somehow is a freebase/sindice for the web2.0 when it comes to the question of “identity”.

My name is already pretty well googleable, so I wonder if I need naymz. Also, their homepage is a bit search-engine optimized. If you go to www.naymz.com, you find a “directory” of links on the lower half of the page and links to entry points, if I click their lawyer directory the first hit is a search engine optimization marketeer. I hesitate a little to join a club that is so optimized on search engines, and not on content. If I google for images on “leo kaiserslautern” it works well, so you could search-engine optimize without having these index-links on the frontpage. Hm.

Techcrunch said two years ago that the company has five employees and has taken an angel investment of $250,000. So they used that to build up a rather complete app, and I guess they already are in second or third VC round. But I don’t find more news about them on techcrunch.

Now I say I don’t join because I don’t need it and I see their “front-page” spamming a bit spooky, what do you think about it? Did anyone read their privacy statement/contracts? Please Comment…

Due to current rumour that appears on the net and in chats around me because of my talk on wednesday at ISWC: gnowsis is not part of KDE. But nepomuk-kde is part of kde.

its all a bit complex: gnowsis was my diploma thesis and was continued as open source project at DFKI, where I started working in 2004. In 2006, NEPOMUK started as a EU project (hence NEPOMUK was then used as project name for an EU research project, not for software) which funded research on Semantic Desktop. Gnowsis continued a bit until about December 2006, when we reached version 0.9.2, which is the last release.

Since then, most of our energy goes into dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org (“Psew”, nepomuk-server) which is a Java-based Semantic Desktop research prototype, and much work also goes into nepomuk.kde.org, which is a KDE based semantic desktop product.

nepomuk-KDE = product
gnowsis = Leo’s hibernating Semantic Desktop open source project
nepomuk-server = java based semantic desktop research prototype (=most many features, but less inteagration with os as KDE has)
psew = GUI for nepomuk-server (at the moment also bundles nepomuk-server)

All of them share the same concepts: RDF on the desktop, a PersonalInformationModel, Annotation of everyday things, embedding into existing applications (=thats where we differ from others like haystack).

but as people keep asking about it: I do long for a working semantic desktop, and porting gnowsis’ simplicity to KDE would indeed be nice.
How nice? Nice enough that you want to pay me something to do it?

Because I would like to continue working on this the next years (NEPOMUK EU project or not) …. the first six years were already quite rewarding 🙂