Semantic Web Approach to Personal Information Management on Mobile Devices

In this paper, we will adopt the Semantic Web as our representational basis, and present some results of applying this approach in the context of mobile devices. Underlying the discussion is a desire to ask (and answer) some "deep" questions about our use of information technology.Personal Information Management, with its new, expanded scope, is now almost synonymous with "personal computing". Not only does PIM now cover a broader spectrum of data (some directly personal, some indirectly via social connections, etc.), but also the variety of devices on (and through) which the users manipulate their personal data has grown, and most users have several devices that they use regularly. This introduces great challenges to how we build PIM systems,starting from various data management and representation issues and spanning through to user interaction problems. Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, and with their increased performance and various ways of sensing their environment, they are better and better suited to building increasingly capable PIM systems. Naturally, the ultimate goal is not PIM per se, but rather to realize technology that can help users by simplifying their everyday lives.