Virtual Butlers! A technology so close and so far! Insights from the RASCALLI project

Today humans benefit from extending their knowledge making use of the Internet, various databases and other sources of digital information. They gain access from different locations using personal computers, laptops, mobile phones, PDAs etc. Various ways to communicate and to exchange information with others are supported by community platforms. The tools/applications we currently employ, however, are all fragmented. The laptop does not know anything about the desktop computer and vice versa. The same holds for the mobile. In the best case, the desktop computer holds a backup of the important data of the laptop of its user, and the other way round, and the address database of one’s mobile and one’s personal computer are synchronized. This requires the user to actively take care of it. More and more people become members of internet communities and platforms such as Xing, Facebook, Delicious, etc. Each one requires its own login and personalization. Thus a single individual has many web appearances which do not know from each other and need to be maintained separately. Only recently, programs have become available that can be customized by the user to log onto the user’s various sites with a single password. See OpenID or kwalletmanager (http://openid.net/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID, http://utils.kde.org/projects/kwalletmanager/) for browser-based online or offline password management systems.