Semantic Desktop Workshop

Semantic Desktop Workshop

Topics and Content

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The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients ? leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators.

The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies.

Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the Web beyond sending emails. The vision of the Semantic Desktop for personal information management and collaboration has been around for a long time: visionaries like Vanevar Bush and Doug Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these ideas. However, for the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long since the foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality were not yet invented ? these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest of the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle. However, recently the computer science community has developed the means to make this vision a reality: the Semantic Web effort (http://www.w3.org/sw) provides standards and technologies for the definition and exchange of metadata and ontologies. Open-source software (like OpenOffice) and the especially the Linux operating system make it possible to reuse and build on top of existing sophisticated systems and create an open personal information management system and collaborative infrastructure based on Semantic Web build into the operating system of current machines.

Collaboration, acquisition and dissemination infrastructures like Wikis and Blogs are providing the foundation for joint collaborative knowledge creation and are essentially simplified knowledge acquisition tools. Social Software maps the social connections between different people into the technical infrastructure. Online Social Networking enables collaboration relationships as first class citizens, and allows exploiting these relationships for automated information distribution and classification.

P2P and Grid computing, especially in combination with the Semantic Web field, develops technology to interconnect large communities without centralized infrastructures for data and computation sharing, which is necessary to build heterogeneous, multi-organizational collaboration networks. The application of the mentioned technologies, especially in combination with the Semantic Web, to the desktop computer in order to improve personal information management and collaboration is the main topic of this workshop. Several systems have been created already to explore this field, e.g., the Haystack system at MIT, the Gnowsis system at DFKI, or the Chandler system by the OSA foundation.

Each of these systems only address some parts of the picture. Furthermore we are in danger of resulting in many fragmented efforts, each of which will not reach critical mass and thus will not be able to penetrate the user space wide enough to result in mass adoption.

The main focus of this workshop is on providing an overview of existing approaches and elaborating the next steps necessary in order to bring the Semantic Web to the desktop computer. More specifically, workshop topics include:

• Architectures and frameworks for integrating the Semantic Web into a Desktop environment
• Personal Information Management tools (calendar, address books, email, documents, ideas) that interoperate with the Semantic Web
• Enhance searching and information retrieval on desktop computers using ontologies and metadata.
• Means to extract metadata from desktop applications (e.g., OpenOffice etc.)
• Knowledge Acquisition and Visualization tools for desktop applications
• Integration and exploitation of semantic social networks into a semantic desktop environment
• P2P models for distributed architecture enabling collaboration with Semantic Desktop nodes
• Applications of the Semantic Desktop, for e.g, eScience and eGovernment.
• The workshop will be organized in part around talks presenting research result in the intersection of the Semantic Web and desktop applications. Another important part of the workshop will be to bring together researchers and practitioners that are already working on Semantic Desktop applications, which will lead to a better communication in the field. The proceedings will be published on the Web. Publication of selected contribution with a major journal is under negotiation. We plan to setup an online platform to exchange information and to keep the discussion alive even after the workshop.

Submission and Important Dates

Please follow the style guides according the Springer LNCS format outlined at: http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-164-2-72376-0,00.html Technical papers should have max. 15 pages including references, position papers should not exceed 5 pages. Papers can be associated with a demo. Please submit documents as HTML, PDF, or Word to semdesk2005@semanticdesktop.org.

Workshop Chairs (alphabetical)

Stefan Decker

Address: Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland , Galway
Phone: +353 512483
E-mail: Stefan.decker@deri.org
WWW: http://www.isi.edu/~stefan/

Jack Park

Address: SRI International, Menlo Park
Phone: +1 650 859-2646
E-mail: park@ai.sri.com
WWW: http://www.ai.sri.com/software/IRIS

Dennis Quan

Address: IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Phone: +44 23 8059 2418
FAX: +44 23 8059 2865
E-mail: dquan@alum.mit.edu
WWW: http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~dquan/

Leo Sauermann

Address: DFKI German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH
Erwin Schrödinger Str 57, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Phone: +49 631 205-3503
E-mail: leo.sauermann@dfki.de
WWW: http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann

Program Committee (alphabetical)

• Andreas Abecker (FZI, Karlsruhe, Germany)
• Dan Brickley (W3C, Sophia Antipolis, France)
• Daniel Schwabe (PUC Rio, Brasil)
• David O'Sullivan (DERI, NUIG, Ireland)
• David Schwartz (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
• Dirk-Willem van Gulik (Apache Foundation, Netherlands)
• Doug Engelbart (Bootstrap Institute, USA)
• Gerald Reif (TU Vienna, Austria)
• Giovanni Tummarello (Universita' Politecnica delle Marche, Italy)
• Gregoris Mentzas (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
• Hamish Cunningham (University of Sheffield, UK)
• Heiner Stuckenschmidt (Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Isabel Cruz (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
• Jeen Broekstra (Aduna BV, Netherlands)
• Malte Kiesel (DFKI, Germany)
• Manfred Hauswirth (EPFL, Switzerland)
• Michael Sintek (DFKI, Germany)
• Pat Croke (Hewlett Packard, Galway, Ireland)
• Peter Mika (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
• Simon Phipps (Sun, UK, USA)
• Stéphane Laurière (Mandriva, France)
• Thomas Roth-Berghofer (TU Kaiserslautern and DFKI, Germany)
• Wolfgang Nejdl (L3S, Hannover)
• Wolfgang Prinz (Fraunhofer and RWTH Aachen, Germany