Envisioning the Open desktop of the future

Semantic technologies are bringing a disruptive innovation to the desktop: they empower the users to organize their work entirely around the high-level concept of activities, giving birth to task oriented desktops which are progressively reframing the desktop metaphor. The semantic desktop vision is possibly one of the most important breakthrough since the emergence of personal computing paradigm in the early eighties. It paves the way for radically new ways in taming information overload and in dealing with knowledge at the personal or at the enterprise levels. This conference will present the latest advancements of major open projects in this field and their future.

1 OCTOBER 2009 - 11.00-12.30 - EUROSITES GEORGE V, PARIS

09.00-10.30

OPEN WORLD FORUM OPENING KEYNOTES: with Jacques Attali, Andrew Aitken, Matthew Aslett, Michael Tiemann, etc.

11.00-12.30

Semantic desktop history and future

Prof Stefan Decker, National University of Ireland

Zeitgeist: An event centric approach to the semantic desktop

Seif Lofty, Zeitgeist Founder

Alexander Gabriel, Information Technology Graduated

The Scribo KDE task oriented desktop

Sebastian Trueg, Mandriva

12.30-14.00

Cocktail-Lunch and networking

Prof Stefan Decker

– Semantic desktop history and future

Prof Stefan Decker is a full professor at the National University of Ireland and the director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI http://www.deri.ie) in Galway, a research institute focused on the application and dissemination of semantics in Web, Sensor and Collaboration technologies. His current research interests include the Semantic Web and Semantic Desktop, ontologies and semi-structured data, Web services, and applications for Digital Libraries, Knowledge Management, Information Integration and Peer-to-Peer technology. He established one of the first Semantic Web research groups, co-initiated the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop project http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org and continues to provide the foundation for making semantic technology applicable and acceptable for collaboration and personal information management environments.

Seif Lofty, Alexander Gabriel

– An event centric approach to the semantic desktop

Seif Lotfy is a student at the TU Darmstadt majoring in Computational Engineering and Applied Mechanics. His contribution to open source started 3 years ago mostly to GNOME projects. Since October 2008, he has invested most of his time managing and leading the development of Zeitgeist https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist, an "Event Aggregation Framework", and of GNOME Zeitgeist, a semantic graphical user interface for browsing documents based on metadata and context.

Alexander Gabriel just graduated in Information Technology. During the time of his studies at Hamburg University of Technology, he became a semantic desktop advocate and an A.I enthusiast. He's the author of Zeitgeist's sister-project Mayanna http://www.mayanna.org, which strives to be a semantic and Web aware data organizer. He was with Zeitgeist from day one, and is a major contributor both in ideas and code.

Sebastian Trueg

– The KDE task oriented desktop

Sebastian Trueg http://trueg.wordpress.com/, living and working in Freiburg, Germany, is best known for K3b, the CD/DVD burning application for KDE which he maintains since 1998. After receiving his diploma in computer science from the university of Freiburg, he started working for Mandriva http://www.mandriva.com on the Nepomuk project http://nepomuk.kde.org. He's been bringing the semantic desktop technologies to KDE since 2006. He is currently involved in the Scribo project http://www.scribo.ws which integrates text analysis and natural language processing tools with KDE and Nepomuk.

2009 Partners

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