Thesis descriptions for OpenIRIS

Semantic Desktops aim to bring semantic annotations and intelligent reasoning capabilities to computer desktop environments. In several projects under way, researchers bring together theoretical concepts inherent in the semantic web as well as state of the art search and index tools such as Google Desktop. By using semantic desktop environment, researchers envision that users should reason about the objects or relations of their domain, rather than reasoning about the representations of these objects. As an example, a staff officer in a military planning scenario may be interested in reaching the author of a plan document that describes available resources. The object of concern is then a person, who may be represented in a document as a meta tag denoting the author of the document, or in an address book denoting a contact. Both these representations describe the same object of concern from the user’s point of view, and a semantic desktop environment would not see these two representations as different concepts. In a military planning context, this is accentuated by the amount of documents used and the intense communication among members of staff.