The title of this post is an expression of my gut reaction to
the quotes below, which originate from Leo
Sauermann's post about the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop for KDE:
Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of
the Knowledge Management Department at Deutsches
Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI, or the German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Nepomuk's
coordinator, explains, "The basic problem that we all face nowadays
is how to handle vast amounts of information at a sensible rate." According to
Bernardi, Nepomuk takes a traditional approach by creating a
meta-data layer with
well-defined elements that services can be built upon to create and
manipulate the information.
The comment above echoes my sentiments about the imminence of
"information overload" due to the vast
amounts of user generated content on the Internet as a whole. We are going to need to
process more an more data within a fixed 24 hour timeframe, while
attempting to balance our professional and personal lives. Be rest
assured, this is a very serious issue, and you cannot event begin
to address it without a Web of Linked Data.
"The first idea of building the semantic desktop
arose from the fact that one of our colleagues could not remember
the girlfriends of his friends," Bernard says, more than
half-seriously. "Because they kept changing -- you know how it is.
The point is, you have a vast amount of information on your
desktop, hidden in files, hidden in emails, hidden in the names and
structures of your folders. Nepomuk gives a standard way to handle
such information."
If you get a personal URI for Entity "You", via a Linked Data aware platform (e.g. OpenLink Data Spaces) that virtualizes data
across your existing Web data spaces (blogs, feed subscriptions,
wikis, shared bookmarks, photo galleries, calendars, etc.), you
then only have to remember your URI whenever you need to "Find" something,
imagine that!
To conclude, "information overload" is the imminent challenge of
our time, and the keys to challenge alleviation lie in our ability
to construct and maintain (via solutions) few context lenses (URIs) that provide coherent
conduits into the dense mesh of structured Linked Data on the Web.