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The Gnowsis Semantic Desktop approach to Personal Information Management Weaving the Personal Semantic Web Dipl.-Ing. Leo Sauermann German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Trippstadter Straße 122 67663 Kaiserslautern Vom Fachbereich Informatik der Technischen Universitat¨ Kaiserslautern zur Verleihung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften (Dr. Ing.) genehmigte Dissertation Berichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel Prof. Dr. Mehdi Jazayeri Vorsitzender: Prof. Dr. Paul M ¨uller Datum der wissenschaftlichen Aussprache: 5.Juni 2009 The Gnowsis Semantic Desktop approach to Personal Information Management. Weaving the Personal Semantic Web Leo Sauermann Dedication Dedicated to the LORD and His Son Jesus Christ the Savior Who changed my life in the last years and has carved the path that I am following It was the LORD who gifted me with all I have and all I can Thank you, this one is for you Preface As Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila stated in their article in the Scien- tific American in 2001, “The Semantic Web is not a separate Web, but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” In order to do so, formal descriptions are needed, so called metadata, expressing meaning and allowing to interchange and process knowledge via computers. An intuitive way to do so is the employment of ontologies that offer the possibility to explicitly express concepts and their relationships according to the user’s preferences (for instance, there might be concepts like person or organization with a relationship works-for) based on WWW standards. Thus they define a common vocabulary and represent the user’s individual mental models at the same time. However, the success of semantic technologies strongly depends on convincing as many users as possible to participate in distributed but social ontology generation. In his thesis, Leo proposes the Semantic Desktop as an evolutionary approach and a means for personal information management. He describes a well-founded concept and an architecture combining the various bits of information from different desktop applications without changing them. Each information item is treated as a semantic web resource whether it is file (folder or document), an email constituent (i. e., message, sender, recipient, attachment), an address (. ), or a calendar entry, etc.. Based on that, various services are provided to generate, browse, file, annotate, or share resources just running as extensions of the operating system. The thesis discusses a colourful bunch of alternative options how theses service may be used in practice The main part of Leo’s work has been developed within the NEPOMUK project in which DFKI and 15 other partners from science and industry worked to- gether on developing the Social Semantic Desktop. The project ended in 2008 and offers an open platform for semantic applications extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment that supports both the personal infor- mation management and the sharing and exchange across social and organiza- tional relations. Leo’s ideas and inspiration have been a central part of NEPO- MUK. Many thousands of users from science and industry already avail them- selves on this open source platform for further research on semantic technologies. Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel Kaiserslautern, June 2009 vii viii c Leo Sauermann, 2007 Acknowledgements ix It is my pleasure to thank the people and institutions that made this thesis possible. First, I want to give thanks you, the Almighty God for everything received and for taking my life in your hands. You are an awesome God. I want give thanks to my wife Ingrid Brunner-Sauermann, who was with me in good and bad moments during the last years and while writing this thesis. I just love you, live on earth is beautiful with you, a PhD is nothing compared to knowing you. Many thanks go to my parents who supported me in every project I did, be it chaotic or good. My father Wolfgang Sauermann intro- duced me to computers and my mother Dr. Christine Sauermann helped me emotionally to stay motivated and with her expert English knowledge. Dr. Georg Sauermann, my uncle, provided various suggestions for improvement. The presence of academics in the family surely did help a lot. This work was supported by Austrian Bundesminis- terium fur¨ Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur with a Studienabschluss Stipendium (Mar 2003-Jan 2004), by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (bmb+f), (Grant 01 IW C01, Project EPOS: Evolving Personal to Organi- zational Memories) and by the European Union IST fund (Grant FP6-027705, Project Nepomuk). Special thanks go to my fellow researchers at DFKI, the best place in the world to do practical RDF research. Professor Dr. Andreas Dengel supervised this work and I am very thankful for the mentoring he has done, scientifically, personally, and in forming the text. Thomas Roth-Berghofer was leading me in this thesis, he taught me the very details how to write a thesis based on his own successfull thesis, I especially wish to thank him as he motivated me, guided me and cared for the forthcoming of this thesis. Mehdi Jazayeri who asked about engineering and gently waited until I had an answer. Francesco Lelli for reviewing the thesis when it was growing; cutting the bad branches while watering the good ones. I want to thank Sven Schwarz, Heiko Maus, Ludger van Elst, Michael Sintek, Malte Kiesel, Lars Zapf, Kinga Schumacher who were my direct colleagues for the last years, and all the other members of the Knowledge Management Group who supported me with good ideas and endless patience. Ludger van Elst was leading the development of the PIMO ontology within the EPOS project, he formed the formal basis for this part of the work. Sven Schwarz is responsible for the context representation at DFKI, and he influenced me since we started exchanging ideas during my diploma thesis in 2003. Gunnar Grimnes is the soul of gnowsis since 2006 and my room-mate at DFKI, taught me to take a PhD seriously not seriously. As a special credit, I wish Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes to rock as hard as 300 Spartans. The project leader of this century of man- months is Ansgar Bernardi, shephering this crowd without needing a stick. I want to thank Mark Siebert and Pierre Smits who conducted the evaluation of the gnowsis desktop search at Siemens and have helped to keep the system installable and simple. Special thanks are directed to the students and friends who contributed their time to the Semantic Desktop while they have been at the University of Kaiserslautern x c Leo Sauermann, 2007 (in alphabetical order): Benjamin Adrian, Daniel Bahls, Ralf Biedert, Daniel Burkhart, Emmanuel Gasne, Dominik “Heimwege” Heim, Martin Klinkigt, Florian “Sentry” Mit- tag, Antoni Mylka, Gunther¨ Noak, Frank Osterfeld, Moritz Ploßl.¨ Essential to this work are Man Luo, Dominik Heim, Benjamin Adrian, and Danish Nadeem, who wrote their diploma theses under my supervision and contributed to the implementation and evaluation of the gnowsis system, their research work brought us all forward. Dominik Heim made many of the nice graphics that were used for illustrations, and the cover. He also designed the miniquire user interface and many other parts of the gnowsis user interface. Liz Turner designed the gnowsis logo. The cover-art was created by myself using the web service provided by www.wordle.net, with the introduction text of this thesis as input. Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch have accompanied the gnowsis work ever since, Anja was the first student outside DFKI who understood what this is all about, she was also the first outsider approaching us with the wish “I want to see a demo of gnowsis now!”. Rosa´ Gudjonsd´ ottir´ and Kristina “Kicki” Groth from the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Sweden supported me and Dominik Heim with guidelines how to evaluate HCI aspects. I also want to thank the participants of the case studies for their time and investment. Endless developers from other Open Source projects contributed to humanity at large by providing free software.A plethora of open source projects (see Section 7.1) was used while creating the prototype, I thank their respective authors for their work and dedica- tion to the Open Source movement. In the same spirit I want to thank Tim Berners-Lee who made a decision that changed the world: giving away the invention of the WWW for free for us. Since 1994 director of the W3C, despite this important position and the connected responsibilities, you answer questions by newbies (and me) and still do your own code. Many professors and managers stopped caring about the technology much earlier in their career. Assuming that technology changes the world, the right people behind technology are as important. xi Abstract We should no longer ask whether we have enough information, we should rather ask if we can manage the information we have. In theory, a person could store and access all information experienced in a lifetime. But to categorize and understand this information, integrated software tools are needed. Since 2003, I have been working on the vision of a Semantic Desktop to create a tool for keeping information. Based on semantic web standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the information needed by a person to do knowledge work can be integrated and organized. In this thesis, a software architecture for the Semantic Desktop is presented consisting of ontologies, services, and applications. The core ontology is the Personal Information Model (PIMO), a personalized categorization and organisation framework. With it, a formal representation of the mental model of a user can be expressed. This personal information model is then used across applications and across domains, integrating in- formation sources into a coherent view of the world.
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