Harvesting Desktop Data for Semantic Blogging

Harvesting Desktop Data for Semantic Blogging

Abstract. A typical computer user?s desktop contains large amount of for- mal data, such as addresses, events or bibliopraphies. Especially within a corporate or organizational environment, it is often important to exchange this data between employees. However, state-of-the-art communication tech- nologies such as email or bulletin boards don?t allow to easily integrate desk- top data in the communication process, with the e?ect that the data remains locked within a user?s computer. In this paper, we propose that the recent phenomenon of blogging, combined with a tool to easily generate Semantic Web (SW) data from existing formal desktop data, can result in a form of semantic blogging which would help to overcome the aforementioned prob- lem. We discuss a number of preconditions which must be met in order to allow semantic blogging and encourage users to author a semantic blog, and we present a prototype of the semiBlog editor, which was created with the purpose of user-friendly semantic blogging in mind. We argue that such a semantic blog editor should integrate tightly with a user?s desktop environ- ment, as this would make integration of existing data into the blog as easy as possible.