Semantic desktop

The term semantic web might be familiar to you.But what about semantic desktop? Semantic web is a term often used along with "Web 3.0" the next generation of intelligent or executable web as it usually referred by people.Semantic web is a concept introduced by Tim Berners-Lee the originator of the WWW.The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale not as linked pieces of textual information that can be understood only by a human as it is currently.Although a lot of research is going on supporting the semantic web concept and languages like RDF is been developed the idea of the semantic web has failed to materialise in large scale as there is little incentive to create semantic content when there are few services that use it.The idea of a semantic desktop originated from this realization.
Semantic desktop is aimed to help people find and structure information on their personal computers and share it with others in a network.This will act as a stepping stone to achieve the vision of semantic web.The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence coordinated a project called NEPOMUK(Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)to develop a comprehensive solutions for the semantic desktop concept.The Nepomuk software, which consists of independent applications and plug-ins for third-party programs, prompts users to annotate it and establish connections between different information items. this can be integrated in third party application like desktop environments ,browsers and IDEs as plugins. Nepomuk’s semantic annotating and tagging system has been incorporated into the K Desktop Environment 4 (KDE) and works are going on for creating eclipse plugins and integrations into firebox browsers also.Let us hope this will lead us to materialize the vision of Web 3.0 and semantic web.
References
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
Science Daily,Wikipedia-Semantic web,Info mesh,