The semantic desktop at work: interlinking notes

The Semantic Desktop has been proposed as a solution to the ever growing problem of information overload on our computers. It provides the foundations necessary to integrate and manage personal information. However, the challenge of designing and realizing semantic applications that use this infrastructure still remains. In this paper, we present SemNotes, a semantic note-taking tool for the Nepomuk-KDE Semantic Desktop. It provides a real-world, functional use case for fully exploiting the capabilities of the Semantic Desktop: interlinking, organization and management of personal information, improved search and browsing. Furthermore, it represents our solution to a set of identified generic challenges for applications on the Semantic Desktop. We describe a task-based user evaluation comparing SemNotes with a conventional note-taking tool. The results show that complex searches on interlinked information created with SemNotes are significantly faster, with little or no extra effort required from the users.

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