Improving Personal Information Management by Integrating Activities in the Physical World with the Semantic Desktop
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Improving Personal Information Management by Integrating Activities in the Physical World with the Semantic Desktop Yingjie Hu Krzysztof Janowicz Department of Geography Department of Geography University of California Santa Barbara University of California Santa Barbara [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Semantic desktops are a novel approach to improve user in- Each of us is creating and maintaining an increasing terfaces by recording, semantically annotating, and learning amount of personal information, such as emails, ToDo lists, from the user's activities to create a personalized user ex- pictures, bookmarks, or notes. The volume and variety of perience and improve search. Such activities, however, are information created by consumer electronics, reveal the lim- restricted to the information universe, i.e., they only cover itation of traditional information organization mechanisms events on the local desktop. A next step towards smart such as those based on hierarchical directories. Users have to mobile devices is the integration of those desktop events pre-define and constantly maintain a folder structure as well with the user's activities in the physical world. Establishing as decide on how to file a particular information object. A such mappings enables the device to draw conclusions from recent study analyzing email organization shows that even the recorded desktop events to those that the user is likely well structured folders do not provide better performance performing in the physical world. A Personal Information than using the search-file function[12]. One reason for this is Management (PIM) system can then better assist the user that the same information item can be categorized according in task planning and routing. In this work, we propose ac- to different contexts, such as filenames, topics, timestamps, tivity ontologies as blueprints to model the user's activities and content. in the physical world, and use these ontologies to link the Semantic Desktop is a new technology which facilitates Semantic Desktop and the information available on the Web personal information management by establishing connec- of Linked Data. We discuss the principles of designing the tions among the user's documents, emails, tasks, as well as activity ontologies and how to employ them to associate lo- software applications. Two typical examples of the Seman- cal files and applications with complementary information tic Desktop are Nepomuk and Zeitgeist. Both have imple- from the Web. We design a specific activity ontology for a mented ontologies to organize the user's data (which may conference use case and present a user interface that extends be accessed by different applications and stored in differ- the Zeitgeist Semantic Desktop to evaluate our approach. ent formats) and, thus, offer search abilities beyond simple keywords[9]. Categories and Subject Descriptors However, current semantic desktops have two major lim- itations. First, they rely on the availability of metadata K.8.3 [Personal Computing]: [Management/Mainte- to structure the information items. Consequently, a semi- nance]; I.7.1 [Document and Text Editing]: [Document automatic annotator is often provided to extract file descrip- management]; H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: [Human tions as well as to allow the user to input metadata manually factors] [6, 4]. Unfortunately, only a fraction of metadata can be au- tomatically extracted from existing files, and most users do General Terms not annotate their data manually. Second, semantic desk- tops are restricted to those activities that are performed on MANAGEMENT the desktop { a mechanism to match them with the user's experiencing in the physical world is missing. As a result, Keywords while the semantic desktop can learn to open a bibliography Personal Information Management, Semantic Desktop, Se- tool whenever the user opens an Office document, under- mantic Web, Events, Ontologies, Activities standing that this may be part of a larger activity, such as preparing a conference paper, is difficult. Therefore, exist- ing semantic desktops cannot address queries such as 'which Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for research papers did I read while preparing my ACMGIS 2012 personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are paper'. not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies In this work, we argue that a next generation of Personal bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to Information Management (PIM) systems need more than republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS ’12, November 6-9, 2012. just accessing to a rich set of contextual information and se- Redondo Beach, CA, USA Copyright (c) 2012 ACM ISBN 978-1-4503- mantic annotations: an understanding of human activities 1691-0/12/11...$15.00 is necessary for such systems to execute advanced informa- . tion queries. To do so, we propose to associate activities However, existing PIM systems only focus on the local in- in the physical world with those on the Semantic Desktop. formation universe. A closer integration with data and ser- We model activities in the physical world via activity on- vices on the Web is still under research. For example, while tologies, and discuss how these activities are related to their a traditional PIM system may group the conference-related digital footprints on the local Semantic Desktop as well as information objects using a tag ACM GIS 2012, relating on the Web of Linked Data. By doing so, we construct a those information items to the data from previous ACM personal information space in which information items from GIS conferences is difficult. However, the necessary infor- both the Web and the Semantic Desktop are well organized mation to do so already exists on Web knowledge base such and managed. An extension to the Zeitgeist semantic desk- as Freebase. A semantic desktop that understands the rela- top has been implemented to illustrate our approach. tion between a conference and its series therefore can inter- The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Sec- link related tags and information items stored on the user's tion 2 introduces related work on the Semantic Web, the machine. Besides, current PIM systems do not have an un- Semantic Desktop, and personal information management. derstanding on the associations between the user's desktop Next, section 3 discusses the need for activity ontologies activities and those carried out in the physical world. Con- and how they link the data from the Web and the Seman- necting both can help people to quickly find the data they tic Desktop. Section 4, presents an implementation showing used when performing a particular activity in the real world. first results from our work. Finally, section 5 concludes our For instance, such a system could answer the questions such work by pointing out limitations and directions of future as which papers I have read when preparing this ACM GIS research. 2012 manuscript, or which people I may have met during the conference. 2. RELATED WORK This section briefly introduces related work on personal 3. LINKING DATA VIA ONTOLOGIES information management, as well as background readings In this section, we discuss how activities in the physical on the Semantic Web and Semantic Desktops to help under- world can be aligned with those recorded on the Semantic stand the presented work. Desktop, and how to construct activity ontologies to link in- formation items from both the Web of Data and the personal 2.1 Semantic Web and Semantic Desktops Semantic Desktop. The Semantic Web is an enhancements of the classical Web. It employs a stack of technologies and principles to 3.1 Activity Ontologies give well-defined meaning to the information on the Web, We argue that a next generation of PIM systems should and weaves the data into a structure that can be understood have an understanding of the user's activities in the phys- by both humans and machines. With a rapidly increasing ical world. Such activities can be related in several ways: number of Linked Open Data projects, a large amount of they can follow each other, overlap in time, or compose a data have been published or converted into the standard Re- more complex activity. Consider the example of attending source Description Framework (RDF) format and are linked a conference in which a user will write a paper, arrange the to other external datasets. Open web knowledge bases, such trip, and participate in the conference. The travel arrange- as Freebase and DBPedia, enables everybody to contribute ment activity will be followed by the conference participa- timely information about people, places, events, and other tion activity, since attending the conference always succeeds entities. As a result, the Web of Data provides us with dig- planning the trip. However, the paper writing activity and ital counterparts of many aspects of the physical world. the trip planning activity may overlap, as one can start to The concept of the Semantic Desktop is derived from arrange the travel while still writing the paper. All of the the Semantic Web. Its core idea is to bring Semantic three activities are associated to compose a more complex Web technologies to desktop, and turn a personal device activity: attending the given conference. In addition, some into a 'personal Semantic Web'[9]. Similarly, related data activities have well defined start and end dates, while others items on the Semantic Desktop are interlinked. Researches do not. For instance, travel arrangement, such as booking show that people memorize things by topics and their inter- a flight, can be made at any time but need to be finished relations[10]. Thus, the Semantic Desktop organizes per- before the conference.