Helping people remember: Coactive assistance for personal information management on a semantic desktop

Abstract

This paper proposes a co-active information butler giving users assistance on a Semantic Desktop. The information butler is a novel approach for managing documents and information entities on a Semantic Desktop. The Semantic Desktop encourages users to create, label, describe, and interlink information objects (such as emails, files, address book records, etc.) above the level of any desktop application. The proposed information butler recommends users which parts of their information models to take for categorizing and interlinking documents with concepts. Ontology-based document understanding is shown as key technology for implementing such an information butler that automatically recommends concepts of the user's personal information models that have evidences to be relevant for a certain document. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.