I have been tracking everything "semantic desktop" for the last years, but this beauty has evaded me until now. disclaimer: this may not help much to explain the ideas, and is a bit long, but the mystic sound and nice appeal make it mesemerizing to watch - if you can, enjoy this in a relaxing atmosphere....



Here's an animation I did a few years ago to explain the idea of the "social semantic desktop", using Lego visualisations I made in the LDraw CAD package. Music is by yours truly from http://johnbreslin.com/wiki/index.php...

If you are interested in my PhD, you can now buy it on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.de/Semantic-approach-Personal-Information-Management/dp/3866244495/

as blogged before, I finished and published my PhD. Its a good reference on all topics related to the semantic desktop: personal information management, information extraction, pimo, application plugins, semantic wikis, and how people used them.

Now, my work did hit the Amazon store and can be bought by you together with other interesting books such as Founders At Work

P.s.: Disclaimer: If you buy it through the links on this page, you support me, I took this opportunity to join Amazon's affiliate program ;-)

As I just also blogged on OSCAF. I will be there, see that you can join also.

Sebastian Trüg from NEPOMUK-KDE organises a social semantic desktop workshop, a practical meeting to bring pragmatic implementers together.

After the first Nepomuk workshop in June being a great success it is time
to start the planning for the next one. In fact there will be two workshops
before the end of the year: one dedicated to the open social semantic desktop
and one general Nepomuk hands-on coding sprint for everyone interested in
Nepomuk development.

The Nepomuk Open Social Semantic Desktop

techbase.kde.org/Projects/Nepomuk/OpenSocialSemanticDesktopWorkshop2009

This workshop will be focused on the discussion of social features in Nepomuk
and the integration with platforms such as OpenDesktop.

Today Nepomuk allows to handle local resources and data can not be exchanged
with other users. The next step needs to be the integration of such
functionality. It needs to be possible to define privacy parameters on Nepomuk
information, to share Nepomuk data with other users, to integrate information
from online sources, and to enrich online data with the information stored in
Nepomuk.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts from the semantic
desktop and ontology design as well as those from online services and peer to
peer communication. Together the theoretical (and hopefully also
technological) basis for an open social semantic desktop in KDE will be
created.

Important projects related to this topic include Telepathy, Kopete,
OpenDesktop, Silk, and OSCAF, the new desktop ontology project.

The workshop will take place in Freiburg, Germany again (it is just so
convenient for me ;)

If you are interested in participating please add your name, email address,
and the dates that are convenient for you to the Workshop wiki page.

Be aware that the e.V. is sponsoring the event for both travel and
accommodation expenses.

I am looking forward to seeing you in Freiburg.

Regards,
Sebastian Trueg

In October 2006 I started blogging about my PhD, here the aftermath: it is published!

Get your PDF version or printed version directly from the publisher:

http://www.dissertation.de/buch.php3?buch=5954

The ISBN Number is 978-3-86624-449-8

The bibtex is online at bibsonomy:
http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/22b669dcf81fefda8ba233ded900aec9d/leobard

An online version is available here:
http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/papers/Sauermann2009phd.pdf

Alas, now you can finally cite it and it is free to take its place in science.
and I am free, too...

Working at DFKI is awesome, and now there is a video showing the work done by Marcus Liwicki to bring touch-tables and collaborative work to the next level. This is a peak outcome by the people from our km group, led by Professor Andreas Dengel. Saher El-Neklawy did part of the programming, many people contributed here.



Others say:
if you’ve ever had to sit down with people at the collaboration table, I think you’ll recognize how well this system matches that experience. I really appreciate the approach they’ve taken, and I look forward to seeing where else it will go.

Our website says:
The touch&write pen-abled interactive touchtable combines infrared technology for the normal touching and moving with the digital pen technology for high resolution handwriting. This allows an intuitive switch between the modes object manipulation, and content editing.

Touch & Write is an innovative new platform for creating applications, that users find natural to use. It seamlessly integrates the paper world into the digital world. Editing, arranging and writing tasks can be easily performed in an intuitive way.

The construction of Touch & Write as a table top environment encourages collaborative settings. Users surround the table, discuss their ideas and work together. Since intuitive handwriting is allowed as an input metaphor, the creativity is furthermore supported.

Some of the shown parts in the demo are based on technology connected to things we do in the semantic part of DFKI, our department is a really nice environment to work in ;-)

The co-located Akademy/KDE and GUADEC/GNOME "desktop summit" is over, and various bloggers report about the outcome. pro-linux news. Sebastian Trüg witnesses joint conference.

A summary statement on the KDE blogs by Richard Moore reports that NEPOMUK and the Semantic Desktop are key elements to build upon (also mentioning it before the new GUI) and distinguish the KDE desktop from others. During his keynote, Sebastian Kügler, board member of KDE Ev, announced that more funding will go into the Semantic Desktop area:
KDE e.V. will sponsor a series of developer meetings that focus on integrating these features into the desktop. We invite teams inside KDE to think about how their software can benefit from the semantic framework introduced in KDE 4. The semantic desktop has the potential of being a game-changer for the Free Desktop, as it provides a way to model the user's data closer to how the human brain does it. It will move the computer's user interface one step closer to the user. (copied from Richard Moore's post, I cannot cross-check if Sebastian really said that)

Most apparent and important for me: gnome and KDE people work in parallel, but with closer and closer cooperation. An interesting aspect on this merge and cooperation is our contribution from the Semantic Desktop side:
KDE's strigi library is getting closer to gnome's tracker. As Sebastian Trüg writes, tracker is now using RDF and sparql.

As a common ground, developers from both projects agreed in April on using the NEPOMUK ontologies, and this will for cooperation grew and grew since then. I am helping a bit from the side of www.oscaf.org, an organization that was founded as a place for standardization work by DERI, DFKI, and KDE. There I represent DFKI, and we had to rethink our process a lot to cater for the needs of open-source projects.

So, I am watching open-mouthed at how ontologies really help building a common model between domain experts (horrayy, they work) and cannot imagine what will happen soon in the KDE/Gnome community around NEPOMUK. I really can't, because with these many brains who now cooperate, innovation is speeding up by the minute, and its not predictable anymore what semantic desktop applications will be there in a year. Looking forward to it, though :-)

Out of curiosity, Gunnar Grimnes compiled the size of the NEPOMUK codebase.

For the dfkinepomuk branch, where we mostly work on, the stats are:

• lines of code (loc): 539485 (including blank, comment, licenses)
• java files: 1725
• generated loc by rdfreactor: 202113
• largest file generated probably: 30k loc in one file

On Friday, 5th June 2009, I defended my PhD on "The Gnowsis Semantic Desktop approach to Personal Information Management". I defined the PIMO ontology, an architecture built on gnowsis 0.9, and evaluated it. My conclusion is: the Semantic Desktop, as I define it, supports users in filing, finding, and thinking about information.

On Friday, I defended the thesis in a 30 minute talk. I concentrated on one story-line "knowing more than you can remember" and knowledge articulation. Thomas Roth-Berghofer passed on a tip by Professor Richter: have one slide in the presentation that is really complex, to show that you did something challenging. So I drilled down on the dropbox application to show the innards of the system. There was a misunderstanding between one Professor and the School of Informatics about the date, so we had to wait a bit until he finally arrived, but luckily everything went excellent. After the talk the Professors debated about the grade and then called me in, this raises the anxiousness effectively. They decided to grade me "sehr gut", which translates to "magna cum laude" and is the second-best grade (after "summa cum laude").

For preparation, I collected the major arguments that needed to be in the presentation, cut away all the details, took a lot of my slides from my previous 85 talks about the topics, and changed everything to give one coherent story with coherent examples. I also used a few structuring tricks, such as "in-between" slides to separate areas and nice rounded corners. Here is the presentation on slideshare:

Our tradition here goes on to meet at the institute, drink some sparkling wine and give cheers to the candidate. Professor Andreas Dengel, my supervisor, gave a very nice speech about my work and my personality. I gave thanks to my peers, God and Jesus, and to Ingrid, my wife. Then the tradition is to give the candidate a doctoral hat that is built by his peers. Here is the moment:



My hat is awesome, it has a burning man in the middle, is made of tape sculpture, and glows in blacklight:

click the picture to read the details.

We then ate good food from the catering company "Klein-Partyservice" who are locals from Kaiserslautern. I also brought three crates of beer, which was more than enough for the 30 guests. Part of the celebration was opening a bottle of Barolo wine from my best friend Ebo, which tasted excellent. In the night, a few of us went to the frohlocker.de party in Kramladen and we had a lot of fun with the crew there, like bringing some good wine. And the robot:




Max and Heiko slept in Kaiserslautern and we all had breakfast together at my place, great:


This is the last important step of my three-year enterprise to blog about doing a dissertation on Semantic Desktop at DFKI (on that page you find trackback links to all steps).
The finishing step will be publication as book and then receiving the title.

Today I will defend my Phd, which is another point in the long story I blogged about doing a phd.

Things to do 2h before going to the defence:

• test your talk again. do it before good friends who you trust and who will give you positive feedback. In my case: Thomas Roth Berghofer and Olaf Grebner
• but 3 crates of beer and 12 bottels of sparkling wine into the office refridgerator
• use a lot of axe deo-spray to fight cold-sweat-of-panic
• print your presentation slides in case armageddon happens and no beamer is available and you have to give your talk without beamer (thx to Olaf for the tip)
• blog

Then, at 4pm, go and defend your thesis. To put it in starcraft-speak: The attackers will watch you build your base while they have enough time to go for resources and then do a zergling rush. So put your arguments into bunkers and use your tanks for cover fire. Anyway, they are not in for winning, its the joy of attacking you, remember that.

see you on the other side....

Back from Berlin! On webinale.de, I was interviewed by three Journalists/Bloggers about my Semantic Desktop idea and startup. I also gave a talk about Semantic Web, which was one of the more visited talks. Two journalist/bloggers have put their reports online already, read more on our blog
http://www.gnowsis.com/about/node/8

At this years "webinale" web 2.0 conference in Berlin, Leo Sauermann gave a talk about Semantic Web and had the time to talk about gnowsis.com.

Viktoria Trosien from tiburon-tv interviewed Leo Sauermann about the core idea about our startup, read Viktoria's article and watch the video.

For more information about Semantic Web and Semantic Desktop, there is also an interview with Leo Sauermann on Sian-Ru Lai's blog.

Part of this is information about gnowsis.com, in German:

Sian: Du hast ja auch dein eigenes Start-Up. Worum geht es dabei?

· Menschen beim Erinnern helfen. Heutzutage haben wir so viel Information, dass man sich gar nicht mehr alles merken kann. Computer verhalten sich aber immer noch wie Bene-Ordner, also wie starres Paper wo ich Zettel einordne. Wie kann man aber Ordnung in E-Mails, Dateien, Webseiten, Projekte und Kontakte bekommen? Mit gnowsis.com bauen wir gerade eine Firma auf, die mit Web 3.0 Technologien dieses Problem angeht. Man kann sich damit ein persönliches Wissensnetz bauen, dass dann in jeder Anwendung verfügbar ist. Ich sehe dann, woher ich eine Person kenne oder welche Dinge ich zum Urlaub einpacken wollte. Das schwierige ist jetzt, die bestehenden Texte zu lesen und dieses Netzwerk automatisch zu bauen, da sind wir dran. An sich ist das Thema sehr spannend, wir haben da aber schon 6 Jahre dran geforscht und werden bald mit einer einfachen Version auf den Markt gehen. Bin schon gespannt wie sich das entwickelt.