Speaker: Gregor Rosenauer

Recent years have seen the rise of personal note-taking tools with support for linking and tagging, either web-based solutions like Notion or Roam, or desktop solutions like Obsidian and Logseq. All these tools introduce an artificial separation between information we collect as part of our everyday workflow, and information we want to keep, enrich, and search. They also cause a media break and force users into their own ecosystem, causing duplication and reducing reuse of collected information.

Ideally, personal knowledge management should be an integral part of the user’s common workspace, the desktop environment, which was designed for direct manipulation of the user's personal data.

SEN (Semantic ExteNsions) provides a lightweight but powerful semantic desktop infrastructure for the open source desktop OS Haiku (an open effort to rebuild BeOS). Following a data-centric approach, users can manage their personal data without the need for special tools: in Haiku, not only documents or media files, but any type of entity (like e-mails, books, locations, or contacts) is represented as simple files, and their properties attached as openly accessible and searchable filesystem metadata. This is made possible through Haiku's modern filesystem, a clean and open reimplementation of BFS.

SEN builds on this innovative foundation and adds rich support for custom relations and relation properties, which are also stored in filesystem attributes. With minimal extensions to the file browser ("Tracker"), users can intuitively navigate files and their relations. Using relation properties, SEN allows for deep links with additional semantics, e.g. navigating from a book annotation stored in a note to the referenced ebook file, page and section, much like WebAnnotations.

From a philosophical perspective, SEN applies concepts of the noosphere (as coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) to a personal desktop OS.

In my talk, I will explain the basic principles of my approach, building on Haiku and its unique and innovative concepts, and then cover the current state of SEN, including a small demo.