CFP: Semantic Desktop WS 2005

[Leo Sauermann]

Dear KLINK / TENOR Members,
Hello Scott, Aaron

The idea of attaching semantics and enabling Semantic Search is part of
a worldwide need, not only in KDE but on desktop computers in general.

I invite everyone, especially Scott & Aaron, to present TENOR at this
workshop, please submit a paper, and if accepted by the Program
Committee, present it!

cheers
Leo Sauermann



============================CALL FOR PAPERS============================

1st Workshop on
The Semantic Desktop

Next Generation Personal Information Management
and Collaboration Infrastructure

Scott Wheeler at the
International Semantic Web Conference
6 November 2005, Galway, Ireland

http://www.semanticdesktop.org


=======================================================================
[Important Dates and Submission Details]
=======================================================================
* Submissions due: August 1, 2005
* Notification for acceptance: September 1, 2005
* Camera ready due: October 7, 2005
* Workshop date: November 6, 2005

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

***@semanticdesktop.org.

Authors of the selected best papers from the workshop will be asked to
revise their papers based on feedback from the workshop, to appear in a
Special Issue of the Journal of Internet Computing.

=======================================================================
[Topics and Content]
=======================================================================
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. 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) make it possible to reuse and
build on top of existing sophisticated systems

* Collaboration, acquisition and dissemination infrastructures
like Wikis and Blogs are providing the foundation for joint
collaborative knowledge creation

* Social Software maps the social connections between
different people into the technical infrastructure.

* P2P and Grid computing, especially in combination with the Semantic
Web field, develops technology to interconnect large communities

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.

=======================================================================
[Areas of Interest]
=======================================================================

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.

=======================================================================
[Chairs]
=======================================================================

* Stefan Decker (DERI, National University of Ireland , Galway, Ireland)
* Jack Park (SRI International, Menlo Park, USA)
* Dennis Quan (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA)
* Leo Sauermann (DFKI, Kaiserslautern, Germany)

=======================================================================
[Program Committee]
=======================================================================

* Andreas Abecker (FZI, Karlsruhe, Germany)
* Dan Brickley (W3C, Sophia Antipolis, France)
* 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
* Jeen Broekstra (Aduna BV, Netherlands)
* Manfred Hauswirth (EPFL, Switzerland)
* Pat Croke (Hewlett Packard, Galway, Ireland)
* Peter Mika (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
* St?phane Lauri?re (Mandriva, France)
* Wolfgang Nejdl (L3S, Hannover)
* Wolfgang Prinz (Fraunhofer and RWTH Aachen, Germany)

[Scott Wheeler]

Post by Leo Sauermann
Dear KLINK / TENOR Members,
Hello Scott, Aaron
The idea of attaching semantics and enabling Semantic Search is part of
a worldwide need, not only in KDE but on desktop computers in general.
I invite everyone, especially Scott & Aaron, to present TENOR at this
workshop, please submit a paper, and if accepted by the Program
Committee, present it!
cheers
Leo Sauermann

Hi Leo --

Thanks for the invitation. I'll see what I can throw together. I'd
tentatively planned to be on vacation that week, but we'll see.

I should take a moment to introduce Leo to the list and give a brief update on
some of the stuff that's been going on in the Tenor world (since I've been
mostly quiet here).

First Leo, and one or two of his colleagues from the DFKI (German Research
Center for Artificial Intelligence) have joined the list after I did a
presentation there a few weeks back. They're from the Semantic Webs group
there and work on the GNOWSIS project, which has some similarities to Tenor.

We talked quite a bit about the similarities and differences between the two
and possible interoperability. There I'd mostly thought of using RDF as an
export format for Tenor sub-graphs that could then be fed into the GNOWSIS
engine. This would also give them access (though indirectly) to our metadata
layer. Certainly more will follow on that as the components begin to shape
up.

In the rest of the Tenor world we have been fairly active in discussions
lately, just away from the mailing list, and I even almost got around to
checking the stuff into CVS just before we switched to SVN (had the directory
structure checked in, but not the content). I'll finally sit down and get
what I've got checked in in the next couple of days.

Along with that will come a paper that I've written (a revised version of
which would probably work for the mentioned conference) on the structure and
conceptual bits of the Tenor architecture.

In the stuff that I'm planning on checking in the basic components -- Nodes,
Links and Property creation is there and mostly works. The components for
searching and iterating over the graph aren't in place though those will
follow. Specifically one of the next components to be written is a graph
iterator of some sort that is aware of its position in graph traversal and
avoids the requirement to do complete traversal of a query in one step or
hard-limiting traversals. Also each of the directories (currently tenor --
the library, storage -- db stuff, test, docs and apps) also have README files
outlining the components that need to be filled in.

All of this is currently written for Qt 3, but in the relatively short term
future it'll probably move to Qt 4. Of course after waiting for months
because "Qt 4 was almost ready" as soon as there's some code starting to
shape up for Qt 3, Qt 4 is actually in use.

Cheers,

-Scott

[Leo Sauermann]

Hallo Tenor,

Post by Scott Wheeler
I should take a moment to introduce Leo to the list and give a brief update on
some of the stuff that's been going on in the Tenor world (since I've been
mostly quiet here).

Thanks, more about me can be found on
http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann

Post by Scott Wheeler
In the stuff that I'm planning on checking in the basic components -- Nodes,
Links and Property creation is there and mostly works. The components for
searching and iterating over the graph aren't in place though those will
follow.

I still want to point out the similarities to RDF and the corresponding
frameworks.
In RDF (Semantic Web technology by W3C) the core are "resources"
(=Nodes) and relations between resources,
named "statements" (=Links)

RDF uses namespaces to identify different link types and uses URIs to
identify the nodes.
A possible notation for RDF for serialisation or storage is RDF/XML or N3.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3.html
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer

for example, if one file is related to another file, you could note the
link like this:

<file:///home/leo/docs/filea>
<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/relation>
<file:///home/leo/otherdocs/otherfile>.

one can abbreviate the namespace used for the relation like this:
@prefix dc:
<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>.
<file:///home/leo/docs/filea> dc:relation
<file:///home/leo/otherdocs/otherfile>.

There exist vast amount of RDF test data on the web and schemas (=
metadata vocabularies) on www.schemaweb.info
That would allow compability to other solutions, not only desktop but
email clients, social networking software, websites, etc.

Post by Scott Wheeler
Specifically one of the next components to be written is a graph
iterator of some sort that is aware of its position in graph traversal and
avoids the requirement to do complete traversal of a query in one step or
hard-limiting traversals. Also each of the directories (currently tenor --
the library, storage -- db stuff, test, docs and apps) also have README files
outlining the components that need to be filled in.

You don't have to do this.
If you decide to use RDF, you would have stable and tested code
available that does all that, which would spare some sweat on ugly stuff.
An implementation that can do the required things is

http://librdf.org/ - Apache or LGPG license, written in C, mappings to
all major programming languages (java, python, c#, objC ....)

http://rdfstore.sourceforge.net/ - Apache or BSD license, RDF database
with Query and traversal support. written in, C, needs a database

http://sourceforge.net/projects/threestore/ - GPL, C written. Database

there are tons of projects in other programming languages out there, see
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources/#sec-tools


-> If someone wants to know more about how we use this RDF stuff to link
and index desktop data, please contact me, I have been hacking this
stuff for years now.


cheers
Leo