Improving personal information management by integrating activities in the physical world with the semantic desktop

Semantic desktops are a novel approach to improve user interfaces by recording, semantically annotating, and learning from the user's activities to create a personalized user experience and improve search. Such activities, however, are restricted to the information universe, i.e., they only cover events on the local desktop. A next step towards smart mobile devices is the integration of those desktop events with the user's activities in the physical world. Establishing such mappings enables the device to draw conclusions from the recorded desktop events to those that the user is likely performing in the physical world. A Personal Information Management (PIM) system can then better assist the user in task planning and routing. In this work, we propose activity ontologies as blueprints to model the user's activities in the physical world, and use these ontologies to link the Semantic Desktop and the information available on the Web of Linked Data. We discuss the principles of designing the activity ontologies and how to employ them to associate local files and applications with complementary information from the Web. We design a specific activity ontology for a conference use case and present a user interface that extends the Zeitgeist Semantic Desktop to evaluate our approach.