Knowledge Technologies for the Social Semantic Desktop

The web of information has turned into a web of people and is slowly evolving into a web of meaning. Desktop computing of the future will build on WWW-standards like RDF and RDFS allowing to evolutionary gather knowledge through lightweight interfaces by observing the user and learn from his/her actions to work with information within collaborative processes. Thus, the Social Semantic Desktop will allow both, personal information management and secure information sharing within trusted communities. In this keynote paper, I will present some of our ideas to implement such a forthcoming office workspace. I will start with a typical example of how people manage their own information today, depicting deficits and explaining how semantic services could help out. I will give examples of semantic services and show how they can be used for collaboration and community building.