Thesis on Semantic Meeting Annotation published

Man Luo’s Diploma Thesis on Semantic Meeting Annotation is published. She developed a prototype, based on Gnowsis alpha 0.8, to manage Meetings semantically, identifying problems in PIM and solving them using Jena and Java.

You can download:

Semantic Meeting Annotation

The treasures for you Semantic Web hackers:

  • She cites many of you guys out there, from Dennis Quan to Xiao & Cruz.
  • A nice application prototype came out.
  • Jena was used to transform one RDF vocabulary to another, like Leigh Dodds did here. Her Java/Jena code on that is here. And she uses these rules.

Abstract
Nowadays, the personaldesktop contains an enormous amount of information, which we use, process, and search in our daily work. Facing so much information, people pay more attention to Personal Information Management (PIM), which enables people to gather, organize, and synthesize information with flexibility and speed.

A significant use for PIM is in business environments, for instance, categorizing business-partners contact information; arranging the agenda; retrieving business information in internet and so on. Among the business actions meetings are important components, and accordingly the management of meeting is treated as a cornerstone of PIM. It assists people to annotate meeting information, collect related materials, and manage different meeting notes, etc.Using current PIM tools, we still face the problems of filing information and information overload. In order to exceed today’s state, this thesis presents a meeting management tool based on the Semantic Desktop environment– Gnowsis, which is an extension of desktop computers using Semantic Web techniques.

We call this tool Semantic Meeting Annotation. It builds on a Meeting Ontology that defines all the elements and relations in the meeting domain using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The ontology binds with the annotation application to provide the user a semantic annotation environment, that is, the user can annotate meeting information with all kinds of data, and create links between a meeting and the related data according to the semantic relations defined in the meeting ontology. Other applications (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) based on the Semantic Desktop technology are integrated.

Additionally, the semantic meeting annotation is used to infer new knowledge, based on existing annotation information and rules, by this the user’s effort to enter information is reduced. The implementation is using the Jena inference engine and a series of inference rules.

We think that, using semantic meeting annotation will enable the user to annotate a meeting effectively and semantically.

Asimo History

Honda has published a history of their Asimo robot series, very interesting and a nice background on research: boys, it takes time to make something good.

read ASIMO here!

that inspired me te brushup the image by them and compare it to current semantic desktop proceedings. If we compare the state of ASIMO with semantic desktop, it would look like this:
mashup of asimo and semantic desktop

robotics is sometimes as ambitious as semantic web. It hink the current Semantic Desktops look like early ASIMO prototypes while end-users expect them to look like Microsoft Software, like people expect robots to look like Enterprise’s ‘Data’ and robots look like metal with motors.
there is hope though, that we will be faster with semantic desktop than with humanoid robots

Slides of Jean Rohmer’s talk

On 17th May, Jean Rohmer gave a talk on Artificial Intelligence and his Semantic Desktop implementation, Ideliance, at DFKI.

See the previous blog entry. Now we have the slides of his talk to be published. Note that the Ideliance slides are similar to the slides he presented at the ISWC2005 workshop on the Semantic Desktop.

The second slides show a nice screenshot of Ideliance (page three), how Jerome Euzenat and Ireland are connected. You will find many known names there.

Gunnar Grimnes celebrates Norwegian National Day

Gunnar celebrates Norwegian constitution day, which is 17th of May!

Note the flag and the stripe on his chest. cool.

Wikipedia explains this behaviour by the following historical incident:

After Denmark-Norway was attacked by England, it entered into an alliance with Napoleon, and in 1814 found itself on the losing side in the Napoleonic Wars and in dire economic conditions. The Dano-Norwegian Oldenburg king was forced to cede Norway to the king of Sweden. Norway took this opportunity to declare her independence, adopted a constitution based on American and French models and elected the Danish crown prince Christian Fredrik as king on May 17, 1814.