KDE and The Semantic Desktop by Vishesh Handa.
From the post:
During the KDE4 years the Semantic Desktop was one of the main pillars of KDE. Nepomuk was a massive, all encompassing, and integrated with many different part of KDE. However few people know what The Semantic Desktop was all about, and where KDE is heading.
History
The Semantic Desktop as it was originally envisioned comprised of both the technology and the philosophy behind The Semantic Web.
The Semantic Web is built on top of RDF and Graphs. This is a special way of storing data which focuses more on understanding what the data represents. This was primarily done by carefully annotating what everything means, starting with the definition of a resource, a property, a class, a thing, etc.
This process of all data being stored as RDF, having a central store, with applications respecting the store and following the ontologies was central to the idea of the Semantic Desktop.
The Semantic Desktop cannot exist without RDF. It is, for all intents and purposes, what the term “semantic” implies.
…
A brief post-mortem on the KDE Semantic Desktop which relied upon NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personal, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge) for RDF-based features. (NEPOMUK was an EU project.)
The post mentions complexity more than once. A friend recently observed that RDF was all about supporting AI and not capturing arbitrary statements by a user.
Such as providing alternative identifiers for subjects. With enough alternative identifications (including context, which “scope” partially captures in topic maps), I suspect a deep learning application could do pretty well at subject recognition, including appropriate relationships (associations).
But that would not be by trying to guess or formulate formal rules (a la RDF/OWL) but by capturing the activities of users as they provide alternative identifications of and relationships for subjects.
Hmmm, merging then would be a learned behavior by our applications. Will have to give that some serious thought!
I first saw this in a tweet by Stefano Bertolo.