Publikation
The Semantic Desktop - Next Generation Information Management & Collaboration Infrastructure. Proc. of Semantic Desktop Workshop at the ISWC, Galway, Ireland
Stefan Decker; Jack Park; Dennis Quan; Leo Sauermann (Hrsg.)
International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), CEUR Workshop Proceedings ISSN 1613-0073, Vol. 175, CEUR-WS, 2005.
Zusammenfassung
The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we com-
municate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological
success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and
in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient
support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a
single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and
organizing this file times the number of recipients—leading to more and more
of peoples’ time going into information filtering and information management
activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support
for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries be-
tween personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and
establishing and deploying trust among collaborators.
The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective
access, providing standard means for formulating and distributing metadata and
Ontologies.
Still, we miss a wide use of SemanticWeb technologies on personal computers.
The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on
desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web,
enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management
as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the Web beyond
sending emails. The vision of the Semantic Desktop for personal information
management and collaboration has been around for a long time: visionaries like
Vanevar Bush and Doug Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these
ideas. However, for the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long
since the foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality
were not yet invented—these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest
of the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle.