“Welcome to the Nepoverse”

Yesterday morning I woke up with this greeting on my mind, a greeting to all those who are interested in the goal of the Nepomuk project: the Social Semantic Desktop. And it got even better: the Nepoverse did not exist in the Googleverse. Until now!
As you may know, we–the Nepomukians–strive for providing you with new tools for better working with (your) knowledge. We want to change the way we, as knowledge workers, live in and with the digital world, not only by providing cool Nepomuked applications and a feature-rich toolbox, but by building a community around the Social Semantic Desktop. Thus, we are shaping our own universe, don’t we?

Beautiful diagrams with OmniGraffle

Another great tool, which I am growing fond of more each day, is OmniGraffle, “the premier diagramming application for Mac OS X”. This tool was part of the bundle when I got my PowerBook G4. But only when I saw it in action (Thanks again, Cédric!) I figured what a cool tool I already had for quite some time. Well, better late than never, I s’pose. (Look at an example on Cédric’s blog. This is not the only example there, mind you.)

And when you are at it, don’t miss to look at Omni Group’s blog The Omni Mouth and at GraffleTopia where you will find a lot of stencils. When I switched back from a Windows machine–yeah, I was stuck with Windows for a few years of my professional career–I missed especially one application, Visio, with which I had drawn all figures of my dissertation. Well, this hole is filled. Finally.

NEPOMUK presentation @ MIT

Already more than two weeks ago I was there, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having a meeting with Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, and two of his senior researchers at MIT CSAIL / W3C, Ralph Swick and Dan Connolly.

In the 2.5 hours meeting, we briefly discussed some of my previous work in the MedCIRCLE project, which also was Semantic Web related and provided metadata on health information websites. Most of the time, of course, was spent on NEPOMUK and the gnowsis system. The presentation slides are here.

On the day before, TBL had presented the Semantic Web vision in his keynote address at AAAI-06. Many artificial intelligence researchers still do not see (or do not want to see?) the potential of the Semantic Web, especially for AI. This–at least, it is my own experience–is due to their lack of knowledge about what the Semantic Web is. I hope TBL could convince some more people during his talk. For us in the NEPOMUK project, based on his talk, I can confirm that our approach of the Semantic Desktop is fully compatible with his vision.

During the meeting we touched only some technical bits of the current gnowsis implementation, i.e., the Personal Information Model PIMO and the Miquire sidebar. The accessibility of PIMO concepts, for example http://ontologies.opendfki.de/repos/ontologies/pim/pimo#Person for the concept Person, was checked instantly using their generic data browser: Tabulator – Async Javascript And Semantic Web. Check out this really useful tool!

The meeting was a very pleasant experience. TBL and his group have not been aware of NEPOMUK and would like to be kept informed about our progress. ISWC 2006 presents itself as the next good opportunity to do so as NEPOMUK project members will be there as well as TBL.

P.S.: One side remark from TBL on “NEPOMUK” and “gnowsis” was that both names were really hard to pronounce.