Using Your Desktop as Personal Digital Library

The recently arrived desktop search applications are weaker than their web siblings as they cannot rely on PageRank-like ranking methods which have revolutionized web search, since the documents are not well connected on the desktop. The general aim of this thesis proposal is to discuss how to enhance and contextualize desktop search based on semantic metadata collected from different contexts (email, files and browser cache) and activities performed on a computer. We describe the semantics of these different contexts by appropriate ontologies and show how to extract and represent the corresponding context information as RDF metadata and how to use them in the context of the semantic desktop.