Turning the mouse into a semantic device: The seMouse experience

Abstract

The desktop is not foreign to the semantic way that is percolating broad areas of computing. This work reports on the experiences on turning the mouse into a semantic device. The mouse is configured with an ontology, and from then on, this ontology is used to annotate the distinct desktop resources. The ontology plays the role of a clipboard which can be transparently accessed by the file editors to either export (i.e. annotation) or import (i.e. authoring) metadata. Traditional desktop operations are now re-interpreted and framed by this ontology: copy&paste becomes annotation&authoring, and folder digging becomes property traversal. Being editor-independent, the mouse accounts for portability and maintainability to face the myriad of formats and editors which characterizes current desktops. This paper reports on the functionality, implementation, and user evaluation of this "semantic mouse". © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.