Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Technology Review: Semantic Sense for the Desktop

An open source semantic solution; see the full article for more details 

Nepomuk is distinguished by a more practical vision, says Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of knowledge management research at DFKI. The software adds a lot of semantic information automatically and encourages users to add more by making annotated data more useful. It also provides an easy way to share tagged information with others.

The software generates semantic information by using "crawlers" to go through a computer and annotate as many files as possible. These crawlers look through a user's address book, for example, and search for files related to the people found in there. Nepomuk can then connect a file sent by a particular person with one related to the company that person works for, making Nepomuk a particularly useful way to search a computer, Bernardi says.

While most operating systems let users search on their computer by keyword alone, Nepomuk can uncover more useful information by focusing on the connections between data; it can locate relevant files if they don't mention the keyword used to search. And peer-to-peer file-sharing architecture built into the system also makes it easy to share files and the associated semantic data between users.

Technology Review: Semantic Sense for the Desktop

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