I visited Jean Rohmer, working at Thales in Paris, to present Nepomuk and related ideas on the social semantic desktop.

Jean is an AI veteran in France, working at Bull computers and within his own company before, and is now employed by Thales to work on Ideliance, a Semantic Desktop. They sell it primarily to government and military customers, these are the primary Thales customers.

My presentation included the basics of my work, the current Nepomuk goals, and a few examples taken from the Gnowsis project.

Here are pictures of the audience:



And me presenting:


The presentation can be downloaded here:
gnowsis_nepomuk.pdf

I used the same outline I have been using since 2003, but unlike the last years, I found that one of the sentences from my 2003 presentations was missing: "if PIM is the main use of a PC –why is it not defined in the operating system?"

This is a central motivator for my work: making a Semantic Web layer on the desktop, that allows managing your files as easy as web resources, but with Sematic Web coolness. Meaning, your computer knows of people, projects, places, topics, and not only of files.

Last week we had several Nepomuk related meetings in Paris, one I attended myself. The Nepoverse came together to discuss user interface related things.

Yngve Sundblad and Bosse Westerlund from the HCI group at CSC from the Stockholm university were there, with their staff Rosa, Kikki, Sinna, Henrik and Christian, and more I think..

They presented our current state and many prototypes they did, mostly video prototypes. Also they start to identify features, we gave priorities to them and had to work on the ideas.

For example, this is such a user interface idea:

This is a still photograph of a video presentation, you will see the results of this interface in about a year in the open source implementations.

During the meeting, we:

* read e-mails


* watched presentations


and worked on prototypes. This point I did not photograph, because I had to work.

We also had dinner together, here are some pictures:






Alltogether a good meeting on the social semantic desktop features, we worked for three days, some people also had meetings before and after.