Semantic Personal Information Management

Personal Information Management is an everyday task for everyone both in private life and work life. The range of Personal Information Management tasks is broad, including correspondence with friends as well as the preparation of comprehensive expert reports in business life. Thus, everybody is an information manager today. Information technology (IT) can support information managers, e.g. by simplifying the organization and retrieval of information. Consequently, traditional PIM environments (e.g. the classic desk with drawers) and work processes are continuously transferred to IT systems. Yet, IT support for PIM is limited. Today’s information managers are confronted with a diversity of storage devices, data formats and PIM tools that hamper the effective, efficient, and satisfactory conduction of PIM processes. In this thesis we present our research contributions that have been published at top-level international research conferences and which show how to improve IT-support for PIM. This thesis presents solutions for the knowledge engineering and system design of advanced PIM infrastructure that facilitates the semantic description and linkage of information which benefits information managers. Furthermore, we have developed a novel method for the authority ranking of such semantically linked information that provides fine-grained rankings which support the exploration of the available information by browsing and searching. Additionally, we present the first summative evaluation of a semantic desktop that exploits the infrastructure and methods presented in this thesis.