Artificial Intelligence and Social Semantic Collaboration

The semantic web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standard means for formulating and distributing metadata and ontologies. However, we miss a wide use of semantic web technologies on personal computers. The use of ontolo-gies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the web beyond sending e-mail. The goal is an open personal information management system and collaborative infrastructure based on semantic web technology build into the operating system of current machines. Collaboration, acquisition and dissemination infrastructures like wikis and blogs are providing the foundation for joint collaborative knowledge creation and are essentially simplified knowledge acquisition tools. Social software maps the social connections between different people into the technical infrastructure. Online social networking enables collaboration relationships as first class citizens, and allows exploiting these relationships for automated information distribution and classification. P2P and grid computing develops technology to interconnect large communities without centralized infrastructures for data and computation sharing, which is necessary to build heterogeneous, multiorganizational collaboration networks. The application of the mentioned technologies, especially in combination with the semantic web, to the desktop computer in order to improve personal information management and collaboration is the main topic of this special track.