Personal Semantic Data – PSD 2011
From the website:
Personal Semantic Data is scattered over several media, and while semantic technologies are already successfully deployed on the Web as well as on the desktop, data integration is not always straightforward. The transition from the desktop to a distributed system for Personal Information Management (PIM) raises new challenges which need to be addressed. These challenges overlap areas related to human-computer interaction, user modeling, privacy and security, information extraction, retrieval and matching.
With the growth of the Web, a lot of personal information is kept online, on websites like Google, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook. We also store pieces of personal information on our computers, on our phones and other devices. All the data is important, that’s why we keep it, but managing such a fragmented system becomes a chore on its own instead of providing support and information for doing the tasks we have to do. Adding to the challenge are proprietary formats and locked silos (online or offline in applications).
The Semantic Web enables the creation of structured and interlinked data through the use of common vocabularies to describe it, and a common representation – RDF. Through projects like Linking Open Data (LOD), SIOC and FOAF, large amounts of data is available now on the Web in structured form, including personal information about people and their social relationships. Applying semantic technologies to the desktop resulted in the Semantic Desktop, which provides a framework for linking data on the desktop.
The challenge lies in extending the benefits of the semantic technologies across the borders of the different environments, and providing a uniform view of one’s personal information regardless of where it resides, which vocabularies were used to describe it and how it is represented. Sharing personal semantic data is also challenging, with privacy and security being two of the most important and difficult issues to tackle.
Important Dates:
15 April 2011 – Submission deadline
30 April 2011 – Author notification
10 May 2011 – Camera-ready version
26 June 2011 – Workshop day
I think the secret of semantic integration is the more information that becomes available, the more heterogeneous the systems and information become and the greater the need for topic maps.
Mostly because replacing that many systems in a coordinated way, over the vast diversity of interests and users, simply isn’t possible.
Would be nice to have a showing of interest by topic maps at this workshop.