PUD 2012 - Workshop on Ubiquitous Personal Data

While our time and energy resources remain constant, the amount of information that needs our attention grows exponentially with the advances in communications and information sharing tools. This explains why personal information management (PIM) is a domain of utmost importance and an active area of interest for research and industry alike.
The tools that we use to manage our personal information have evolved over time from the pen and paper day planners to their numerous digital replacements. The desktop used to be at the centre of the users’ PIM universe. However, the transition is made more and more towards mobile devices (the majority of which have Internet connectivity) and the Cloud. As more online services and applications become available to users and gain popularity, the boundaries between the desktop and the Web become less clear. The desktop is no longer the single access point to personal information, but one of many personal information sources.
Together with easier access to the information, continuous availability, hassle free backups and many other benefits, this split also led to increased fragmentation in personal data across multiple devices, as well as duplication and inconsistency. Desktop and online data silos add to the ever-increasing difficulty of managing such personal information. Social networks and online storage raise many privacy issues, and bring up problems of provenance, trust and security. Consequently, personal information requires more effort by the individual to synchronize, search through and browse - in short, it becomes harder to manage.
The focus of this workshop series is on how technology can improve the user’s experience and relieve some of the stress associated with managing disparate information, online, as well as offline.
The Semantic Web has gained considerable momentum, especially through initiatives like Linked Open Data, which have generated a vast amount of structured data available on the Web. The Semantic Desktop is the result of applying Semantic Web technologies to the desktop, to better interlink personal data and make it easier to search, browse and organise. It lifted the data from the application silos and non-standard formats to a standard RDF-based representation, described using commonly agreed-upon ontologies, enabling queries across data-silos as if they were a single information space.
Personal data is ubiquitous - scattered over several devices, online or offline. While semantic technologies are already successfully deployed on the Web as well as on the desktop, data integration is not always straightforward. The transition from the desktop to a distributed system for PIM raises new (and old) challenges, which represent the subject of this workshop. Related research is being conducted in several disciplines like human-computer interaction, privacy and security, information extraction and matching. Through this workshop we would like to enable cross-domain collaborations to further advance the use of technologies from the Semantic Web and the Web of Data for Personal Information Management, and to explore and discuss approaches for improving PIM through the use of vast amounts of (semantic) information available online. In turn, this workshop is of interest to researchers in the areas of PIM, Linked Data, Web Sciences, Social Collaboration, and more.