Semantic desktop
Encyclopedia
In computer science
, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface
and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications
or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a computer could be. It also encompasses some ideas about being able to automatically share information between different people. This concept is very much related to the Semantic Web
but is distinct insofar its main concern is the personal use of information.
information there is no way for the computer to obtain this information or process it. 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 that information stored on a computer can only be accessed or sorted in a way related to its format. For example, on operating systems such as Unix, e-mail
s 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. Furthermore, even if data is all stored as part of the file system it is often accessed with different applications. Even very similar formats may need to be accessed with different programs - for example PDF, PostScript
, OpenDocument
and ASCII
files are all opened using different programs despite being essentially the same.
(Some operating systems such as BeOS
have database filesystems which store metadata about a document natively in the filesystem.)
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.
A definition of Semantic Desktop was given (Sauermann et al. 2005):
to files. In a more extreme way it could be viewed as a complete replacement to existing user interfaces, which unifies all forms of data and provides a consistent single interface. There are many degrees between these two depending on which of the above problems are being dealt with.
's Maemo Platform.
However the aims of creating an unified interface and allowing data to be accessed in a format independent way are not really the concerns of the Semantic Web.
In practice most projects related to the semantic desktop make use of Semantic Web protocols for storing their data. In particular RDF
's concepts are used, and the format itself is used.
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a computer could be. It also encompasses some ideas about being able to automatically share information between different people. This concept is very much related to the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
but is distinct insofar its main concern is the personal use of information.
General description
The vision of the semantic desktop can be considered as a response to the perceived problems of existing user interfaces. Firstly computers cannot get a great deal of information about the content of 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 copyrightCopyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
information there is no way for the computer to obtain this information or process it. 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
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
is concerned with.
Secondly there is the problem that information stored on a computer can only be accessed or sorted in a way related to its format. For example, on operating systems such as Unix, e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
s 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. Furthermore, even if data is all stored as part of the file system it is often accessed with different applications. Even very similar formats may need to be accessed with different programs - for example PDF, PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
, OpenDocument
OpenDocument
The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....
and ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
files are all opened using different programs despite being essentially the same.
(Some operating systems such as BeOS
BeOS
BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing...
have database filesystems which store metadata about a document natively in the filesystem.)
Related to this a user will often access a lot of data from the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
which is segregated from the data stored locally on the computer, being accessed through a browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
or other programs. As well as accessed data a user has to share data, often through e-mail or separate file transfer
File transfer
File transfer is a generic term for the act of transmitting files over a computer network or the Internet. There are numerous ways and protocols to transfer files over a network. Computers which provide a file transfer service are often called file servers. Depending on the client's perspective the...
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.
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 IdentifierUniform Resource IdentifierIn computing, a uniform resource identifier is a string of characters used to identify a name or a resource on the Internet. Such identification enables interaction with representations of the resource over a network using specific protocols...
(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.
Different interpretations of the semantic desktop
There are various interpretations of the semantic desktop. At its most limited state it might be interpreted as adding mechanisms for relating machine readable metadataMetadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
to files. In a more extreme way it could be viewed as a complete replacement to existing user interfaces, which unifies all forms of data and provides a consistent single interface. There are many degrees between these two depending on which of the above problems are being dealt with.
Standardization Effort
To foster interoperability between different implementations and publish standards, the community around the NEPOMUK project founded the OSCA Foundation (OSCAF) in 2008. Since June 2009, the developers from the nepomuk-kde communities and xesame collaborate together with OSCAF to help standardizing the data formats for KDE, gnome, and freedesktop. The NEPOMUK/OSCAF standards are taken up by these projects and NokiaNokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
's Maemo Platform.
Relationship with the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is mainly concerned with making machine readable metadata to enable computers to process shared information, and the creation of formats and standards related to this. As such the aims of allowing more of a user's data to be processed by a computer and allowing data to more easily be shared could be considered as a subset of those of the semantic web, but extended to a user's local computer, rather than just files stored on the internet.However the aims of creating an unified interface and allowing data to be accessed in a format independent way are not really the concerns of the Semantic Web.
In practice most projects related to the semantic desktop make use of Semantic Web protocols for storing their data. In particular RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
's concepts are used, and the format itself is used.
See also
- Semantic WebSemantic WebThe Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
- Dublin CoreDublin CoreThe Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...
, a set of general terms for annotating resourcesResource (Web)The concept of resource is primitive in the Web architecture, and is used in the definition of its fundamental elements. The term was first introduced to refer to targets of Uniform Resource Locators , but its definition has been further extended to include the referent of any Uniform Resource...
with metadataMetadataThe term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at... - Personal Information ManagerPersonal information managerA personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...
- Knowledge ManagementKnowledge managementKnowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
- Desktop searchDesktop searchDesktop search is the name for the field of search tools which search the contents of a user's own computer files, rather than searching the Internet...
- Concept maps
- Mind maps
- NEPOMUKNEPOMUK (framework)NEPOMUK is an open-source software specification that is concerned with the development of a social semantic desktop that enriches and interconnects data from different desktop applications using semantic metadata stored as RDF...
, a specificationSpecification (technical standard)A specification is an explicit set of requirements to be satisfied by a material, product, or service. Should a material, product or service fail to meet one or more of the applicable specifications, it may be referred to as being out of specification;the abbreviation OOS may also be used...
for a social semantic desktop frameworkSoftware frameworkIn computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by user code, thus providing application specific software... - Haystack, an information client developed at the MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
- ChandlerChandler (PIM)Chandler is a personal information management software suite described by its developers as a "Note-to-Self Organizer" designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. It is free software, previously released under the GNU General Public License, and now released under the...
, a personal information manager - WinFSWinFSWinFS is the code name for a cancelled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003 as an advanced storage subsystem for the Microsoft Windows operating system, designed for persistence and management of...
, a data storage and management system based on relational databases, developed by MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Open Source Implementations
- Semantic Desktop with KDE, NEPOMUK-based social semantic desktop is integrated into KDE Plasma Workspaces
- Gnowsis, an early reference implementation of NEPOMUK
- NEPOMUK Java the Java implementation of NEPOMUK, done in parallel to the KDE one, gnowsis was discontinued by the developers to work on this
- Deepamehta, a software platform for knowledge management
- Tracker, a metadata databaseDatabaseA database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
and file search - Iris, a semantic desktop application framework