The Semantic Desktop - a Basis for Personal Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management software is software that integrates. Existing Data sources, process flows, application features from office appliances have to be brought together. There are different standards, consisting of data formats and communication protocols, that address this issue. The WWW and Semantic Web are designed to work on a worldwide scale and define those standards. We transfer the web standards to the desktop szenario, a vision we call Semantic Desktop – a Semantic Web enhanced desktop environment. Central is the idea of taking know-how from the Semantic Web to tackle personal information management. Existing desktop applications (email client, browser, office applications) are integrated, the semantic glue between them expressed using ontologies. We also present the www.gnowsis.org open source project by the DFKI that realizes parts of this vision. It is based on a Semantic Web Server running as desktop service. It was used in experiments and research projects and allows others to experiment. Knowledge management applications can be built on top of it, reducing the implementation cost. 1