KASIMIR - Work process embedded task management leveraging the Semantic Desktop

The effectiveness of semantic applications can be increased significantly if the system does not urge the users to take care of explicit semantic annotation creation. Today, semantic annotation creation is a well known bottleneck in semantic applications for enterprises. On the other hand semantic technologies have already proven to facilitate, e.g., a more efficient information management especially for knowledge workers (KWs). We pursue in this paper the central idea of using task management as a means for extracting semantic annotations out of the daily work activities in a way that is associated with minimal effort for the KW. To ensure the success of such an approach, a broad acceptance of the task management application by the KWs is a precondition. For this, we present the KASIMIR prototype that embeds task management into the daily work activities of a KW. It facilitates the creation of semantic annotations in form of attributes as well as relations between tasks, users and information objects such as emails, websites, documents, etc. in a manner that is seamlessly integrated into the KW’s work activities. To this end we integrate task management plug-ins into desktop applications, e.g., emails clients and web browsers. These plug-ins interact with a sidebar that creates a consolidated overview of existing tasks and their relations. The underlying infrastructure of the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop leverages semantic web technologies to ensure the efficient management of semantic data.