Research Progress Documents

Abstract

The nine month report looked into ways of connecting information with hypertext and how today's personal information management systems enable the user to locate and connect information in their personal archives. System-generated and user-defined metadata were proposed as enablers of such connections. Mini Thesis Abstract: The amount of data and information available on desktop systems has necessitated better organization and integration methods to aid user comprehension. The World Wide Web (WWW) is also another major source of information, and efforts are being made to make it more readable to both machines and human beings by application of semantic web concepts. The semantic web promises to structure data such that it can be shared and integrated across different platforms and applications. By applying semantic web concepts to desktop data, easier integration of desktop data and web data can be promoted, and desktop data can therefore be easily distributed on the web and collaboration promoted. Metadata about documents or files have been used to help users understand more aspects of the documents, by search systems to improve search results, and by classification systems to categorize documents. The implemented system demonstrates a simple way of utilizing metadata from desktop documents to provide an interface for users to browse documents and their metadata and connect to other semantic information spaces, there- fore providing more information and serving as a reminder on the information they have. A generic framework for integration of desktop data and organisational and public web spaces has to be defined such that these knowledge spaces can be integrated with as less human intervention as possible. Inference and reasoning procedures in the form of rules for comparison of semantic data need to be added to the system such that connections can be made automatically. An efficient method for parsing the RDF data has to be decided, and whether and how to record existing relationships such that results can be refined progressively without significantly slowing the application during browsing.

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