Thank you for pointing out all the semantic desktop work. I have tried Haystack back in 2004. There have also been semantic desktop workshops for a few years, it is hard to ignore such work.

I agree that semantic desktop and (semantic) webtop are closely related. I can imagine that many semantic desktop technologies can be borrowed in building webtops. On the other hand, their difference is also noticeable and not trivial. Essentially, a webtop is an application that will free people from desktop applications – applications are provided as services, data is stored distributively, social interaction is inherently supported, among many other points.

In the past a few months, we have tried to build a group portal. We wish to manage all of our data in a semantically meaningful way and with easy access (e.g., no RDF knowledge is required): homepages, papers, events, tasks, emails, blog, campus life, etc. We have looked at a few projects and software, including semantic desktop projects. As none seems meet our needs, we decided to build a new one based on semantic wiki. It is not yet complete, a half-done site is on http://tw.rpi.edu/wiki . We are still working on more applications (e.g., semantic email) and many UI design things to make it more “desktop” like, e.g., a new skin. I wish this explains better why we come to the term “webtop”.

Regards

Jie

Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search

Well, I wonder why you only wrote a short paper about this and miss your basic research. Googling for “desktop semantic web” gives you all the hits.

The idea has been there in Chandler (OSAF) by Mitch Kapor, in Haystack (MIT), DBIN (Giovanni Tummarello), OpenIris.org, www.gnowsis.org (my own project), nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org (I am also involved in that) (and thats only the working open-source software I can type in 30 seconds, for papers, you find much much much much more)

All these projects are there since 5 years or longer.

Another commenter mentioned Beagle, which is old-school and not-cool-enough: Google for Beagle++ for a fully Semantiified version of Beagle from L3S.de, and why the heck did you not mention KDE 4.1, which has a complete desktop search engine based on RDF, allowing unified tagging and sparql and all the wonders on your desktop?

If this is news for anyone here: KDE4.0 moved to RDF and SPARQL for metadata. It took us a lot of discussion work and coding to achieve that, build upon it.

Do some research, and ping me then, I bet you can come up with something cool on your way and I am interested to keep track of anything coming up here. Of course, we are on track to build a semantic webtop… :-)

Generally, google for “Semantic Desktop” and you are on track with the state of the art, anything you find there will wander off and merge with the web, webtop is a nice buzzword for that, we picked “semantic desktop” in 2003 as a buzzword to keep track of all projects and people. They do the same but call themselves differently (you know, pre web2.0 area, different buzzwords)

of course, I am biased because I am deeply occupied working on all this :-)

To Nicholass: image recognition is also a good idea.