Shared Desktop Ontologies

The vision of the Social Semantic Desktop defines a user’s personal information environment as a source and end-point of the Semantic Web: Knowledge workers comprehensively express their information and data with respect to their own conceptualizations. Semantic Web languages and protocols are used to formalize these conceptualizations and for coordinating local and global information access. The Resource Description Framework RDF serves as a common data representation format. We identified several additional requirements for high-level knowledge representation on the social semantic desktop. With a particular focus on addressing certain limitations of RDF, we engineered a novel representational language akin to RDF and the Web Ontology Language OWL, plus a number of other high-level ontologies. Together, they provide a means to build the semantic bridges necessary for data exchange and application integration on distributed social semantic desktops. Although initially designed to fulfill requirements for the NEPOMUK project, these ontologies are useful for the semantic web community in general.