A personal semantic desktop

Abstract

The advent of the World-Wide Web brought with it a proliferation of information from e-mail, forums, chat, sites that rapidly led to information overload and a subsequent storage problem and maintenance on users' personal computers. The recent massive increase in data has resulted in a continuous effort to enhance our data organisation techniques and hence to the development of better personal information management software. In this paper we present an overview of data organisation techniques related to personal data management. We will look at how personal information managers handle different types of files, and abstract these file types into a single user interface. Despite their advanced user interfaces, we argue that traditional personal information managers tend to be very domain specific and lack in user adaptability. To address these limitations we propose a semantic desktop application that exploits the flexibility of semantic web technologi.es, and introduces the concept of a Personal Ontology to aid in data organisation and can be used by other desktop applications such as information retrieval and intelligent software agents.