Bibliographic Ontology 1.0 released

After months of development the first version of Bibliographic Ontology was published today. This represents an incredibly important milestone for this project, it’s been discussed, developed and evolved over a number of months in order to make sure that this ontology was expressive enough to handle all kind of scenarios for all kind of bibliographic projects. It’s been particularly relevant to us and some of the work we are trying which I’ll be commenting on over the next couple of weeks.

Semantic Desktop, PIM’s and Personal Ontology’s

Abstract
A Semantic Desktop is a means to manage all personal information across application … all » borders based on Semantic Web standards. It acts as an extended personal memory assisting users to file, relate, share, and access all digital information like documents, multimedia, and messages through a Personal Information Model (PIMO). This PIMO is build on ontological knowledge generated through user observations and interactions and may be seen as a formal and semi-formal complement of the user’s mental models. Thus it reflects experience and typical user behavior and may be processed by a computer in order to provide proactive and adaptive information support or allows personalized semantic search. The Semantic Desktop is build on a middle ware platform allowing to combine information and native applications like the file-system, Mozilla, Thunderbird or MS-Outlook. In this talk I will show how machine learning techniques may be used to support the generation of a PIMO. I will further introduce the main concepts, components, and functionalities of the Semantic Desktop, and give examples which show how the Semantic Desktop may become

I was very interested, and a little amused, when I came across this tech talk earlier this week. The talk echoed many of the ideas and points that Alan has been talking to me about recently around the whole idea of using Personal Ontology’s to provide context for applications. It’s a research area he’s particularly interested in and I’m very very excited about the prospect of working with him to develop some of his ideas using the Semantic Web Platform we’ve been building at Talis.

Alan has collaborated on papers on this subject which you can find here. Although the paper on Task Centered Information Management resonates the most with some of the ideas presented in the tech talk.