The first talk is by Leo Sauermann. He gives an update on the state of the semantic desktop engine gnowsis.
“Personal information management is the main use of a PC, why is it not in the operating system?”
Gnowsis is a desktop operating system enhancement. It’s an RDF layer on top of the existing structures and resources of a desktop PC: filesystem, Outlook and so on. You can build cool applications on top of the gnowsis layer.
The main use cases are:
- taking notes on complex structures, kind of like mind mapping
- connecting emails, files, web pages etc. by tagging
- using text classification to move files – the system learns from the tags and can suggest to move new stuff to where existing similar stuff is stored
A couple of ontologies are used to integrate PIM information from different applications and sources. There’s a stack of ontologies. A standardized upper-level ontology provides concepts like Person, a mid-level ontology is organization dependent (e.g. there’s one for the DFKI), the low level is domain- and application-dependent.
A user also builds his own personal information model (PIMO), which is a personal ontology kind of thing. The user has to map his personal concepts to the ontology.
Gnowsis uses Aperture as infrastructure. Using Aperture, developers can build custom adapters that pull RDF out of different data sources (e.g. desktop apps) and feed it into gnowsis.
There’s a nice idea: use Jabber for communication between different gnowsis instances. There would be URIs like gnowsis://sauermann@server123.dfki.de/resources/pimo/leo, the gnowsis protocol is a variant of Jabber, the sauermann@ part is a Jabber ID, the path is a local resource name. This isn’t implemented yet.
They don’t use OWL for ontologies (way too slow, inuntuitive inferencing), but RDFS is not expressive enough (no validation), so they have some kind of “RDFS + X” which aims to be natural for software developers instead of logicians.