Semantic Desktop - General Description

General Description

The vision of the semantic desktop can be considered as a response to the perceived problems of existing user interfaces. Without good metadata, computers cannot easily learn many commonly needed attributes about files. For example suppose one downloads a document by a particular author on a particular subject - though the document will likely clearly indicate its subject, author, source and possibly copyright information there may be no easy way for the computer to obtain this information and process it across applications like file managers, desktop search engines etc.... This means the computer cannot search, filter or otherwise act upon the information as effectively as it otherwise could. This is very much the problem that the Semantic Web is concerned with.

Secondly there is the problem of relating different files with each other. For example, on operating systems such as Unix, e-mails are stored separately from files. Neither have anything to do with tasks, notes or planned activities that may be stored in an calendar program. Contacts might be stored in another program. However, all these forms of information might simultaneously be relevant and necessary for a particular task.

Related to this a user will often access a lot of data from the Internet which is segregated from the data stored locally on the computer, being accessed through a browser or other programs. As well as accessed data a user has to share data, often through e-mail or separate file transfer programs.

The semantic desktop is an attempt to solve some or all of these problem by extending the operating system's capabilities to be able to handle all data using Semantic Web technologies. Based on this data integration, improved user interfaces (or plugins to existing applications) can give the user an integrated view on stored knowledge. Some operating systems such as BeOS have database filesystems which store metadata about a document natively in the filesystem, which is a move towards a more semantic desktop.

A definition of Semantic Desktop was given (Sauermann et al. 2005):

A Semantic Desktop is a device in which an individual stores all her digital information like documents, multimedia and messages. These are interpreted as Semantic Web resources, each is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and all data is accessible and queryable as RDF graph. Resources from the web can be stored and authored content can be shared with others. Ontologies allow the user to express personal mental models and form the semantic glue interconnecting information and systems. Applications respect this and store, read and communicate via ontologies and Semantic Web protocols. The Semantic Desktop is an enlarged supplement to the user’s memory.