Last month's Technology Review featured a piece on semantic computing. Semantic technology -- whether it's applied on the web or the desktop -- seems almost impossibly complex, as it tries to bring some very human traits of relating and connecting information to a machine environment. The artificial intelligence field, relatively speaking, is in its infancy, and since the human brain is largely an indistinguishable mix of biology and culture, it would seem semantic technology would be confined to psychology departments and computer science labs.
That isn't the case, of course. And when you consider that semantic technology deals with computers and people, and that any technology or study ultimately benefits from larger participant pools, it's little wonder that the Nepomuk project is open source and now even comes integrated with the KDE desktop.
