Harvesting Desktop Data for Semantic Blogging

A typical computer user’s desktop contains large amount of formal data, such as addresses, events or bibliopraphies. Especially within a corporate or organizational environment, it is often important to exchange this data between employees. However, state-of-the-art communication technologies such as email or bulletin boards don’t allow to easily integrate desktop data in the communication process, with the effect that the data remains locked within a user’s computer. In this paper, we propose that the recent phenomenon of blogging, combined with a tool to easily generate Semantic Web (SW) data from existing formal desktop data, can result in a form of semantic blogging which would help to overcome the aforementioned problem. We discuss a number of preconditions which must be met in order to allow semantic blogging and encourage users to author a semantic blog, and we present a prototype of the semiBlog editor, which was created with the purpose of user-friendly semantic blogging in mind. We argue that such a semantic blog editor should integrate tightly with a user’s desktop environment, as this would make integration of existing data into the blog as easy as possible.