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DERI – Digital Enterprise Research Institute
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The Social Semantic Desktop





Stefan Decker and Martin Frank



DERI Technical Report 2004-05-02
May 2004

The Social Semantic Desktop
,
Stefan Decker
DERI, NUIG, Ireland
stefan@deri.ie
Martin Frank
ISI, USC, USA
frank@isi.edu
,


Abstract

This whitepaper we vision of a new group
collaboration infrastructure, the Social Semantic
Desktop, drawing from co-evolving research in the
Semantic Web, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networks, and Online
Social Networking. The Social Semantic Desktop is a
novel collaboration environment, enabling the creation,
sharing and deployment of data and metadata.

1. Introduction

The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have
revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate -
their mass adoption is one of the major technological
success stories of the 20th century. We now face a
qualitatively different problem, information overload, that
necessitates smarter and more fine-grained computer
support for networked information, and that has to blend
the boundaries between personal and group data, while
simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing
trust. In other words, the current computing infrastructure
does not really support knowledge workers all that well:
for example, sending a single file to a mailing list
multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and
organizing this file times the number of recipients –
leading to more and more of peoples’ time going into
information filtering and organization activities.
Centralized collaborative infrastructures (like BSCW [22]
or Sharepoint) help to a certain extent, but the current
application infrastructure does not let you interconnect
separate data items, like the author of a document and her
corresponding entry in your address book - much less let
you share that interconnection with others.
Several new technology thrusts have now emerged which
could dramatically impact how people interact and
collaborate: The Semantic Web, P2P Computing, and
Online Social Networking. This paper presents a vision of
how the different thrusts will evolve to produce the Social
Semantic Desktop, which enables people and
communities to directly collaborate with their peers while
dramatically reducing the amount of time they spend
filtering and filing information.

2. Usage Scenarios

We exemplify the impact of a Social Semantic
Desktop with two usage scenarios.

2.1. Surviving the Information Flood and
Creating Knowledge in the Process

In our daily life, many of us get hundreds of emails,
often with documents attached from the various different
projects and communities we are involved in. These
documents are always created within a context on the
author’s machine – but they are send out as if they had no
context – they arrive without trusted metadata that would
allow automatic processing and filing on the recipient’s
machine. The process has the following shortcomings:
• Apart from the folder structure the current Windows-
style desktop and file system provides no support for
organizing the information in the documents. This
means the recipient has to cope with an insufficient
support of current desktops systems for organizing
the information – you may put them under the 2004-
04 folder, or the Proposals folders, or the Semantic
Web Research folder – but not all three.
• Since the metadata of the document has been lost
when sending the email every recipient has to
reinvent and recreate their own metadata, re-
categorize the document and create the possible
connections to other information. This is only of
marginal societal value because most metadata has
been created before.
• Even if metadata was integrated into the email, the
author and the recipient of the document usually have
different, personal classification schemes, and there
is no way to selectively “open-source” them and
align them with others’.
It is clearly possible to share and replicate documents
as well as metadata via direct P2P connections. It should
be possible for sub-communities to derive metadata in a
distributed fashion via an implicit or explicit consensus
process. Connections and relationships with other pieces
of information could then be accessed by all members of
the community – in this sense a distributed knowledge
base is constructed around the work topics, documents,
and information contained in these document. The
information can then be viewed in multiple dimensions