Is anybody working on the Semantic Desktop/Interface?

7 points by awillshire 11 years ago | 1 comment

Hi All,

Just wondering - is anybody aware of interesting movement in the semantic desktop area? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop

Maybe it's pie in the sky, but I think not. The essential nature of the Windows interface hasn't hugely evolved since the early days - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows#mediaviewer/File:Windows1.0.png

I'm not sure what it'll look like, but my gut is that the right implementation of a semantic interface could be a sea change. I think the term desktop however is kind of defunct, since it will need to be ubiquitous across a user's/organisation's devices. Love to hear any thoughts.

Cheers, Andrew.

walterbell 11 years ago |

Take a look at the digital.me EU project, which seems to have wrapped up after prototyping a cross-device architecture with role separation. Some earlier semantic desktop efforts floundered due to poor performance caused by RDF. Current, less ambitious KDE effort uses sqlite & xapian, https://community.kde.org/Baloo.

http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/

http://www.dime-project.eu/DescargarDocumento.aspx?idd=5207

"The Digital.Me project introduced the concept of a personal information sphere, referring to multiple devices (including personal computers, tablets and smartphones) and also remote Web services and online accounts as holders of personal information. In view of the need to integrate and better manage this distributed personal data, a number of extensions to existing ontologies, plus a number of new ontologies have been submitted and published by OSCAF. These include coverage not only of new and yet 'traditional' personal information that is of direct interest to the user (DLPO - for online item sharing), on more than one device (DDO) and online accounts (DAO), but also of context/presence-related information (DCON, DPO), privacy preferences, user histories (DUHO) as well as ontologies for the personalisation and customisation of entire systems and automised events (DRMO)."

Some Java code was released in Aug 2013: http://dime-project.github.io

There is the "Hub of All Things" project in the UK, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/research/business_tran... which includes http://nymote.org

One could argue that Tiling Window Managers are relevant to semantic desktops, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_Tiling_Wi...

Are you interesting in using or developing a semantic desktop -- open-source, proprietary or hybrid?