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R. Paizoni:
"The Semantic Clipboard";
Supervisor: G. Reif, S. Dustdar; Instutut für Informationssysteme, 2005.

The Semantic Web promises a revolutionary extension of the common World Wide Web that makes contents ofWeb sites understandable by machines. Additional information in the form of meta-data is used to describe the meaning ofWeb-contents in a machine-processable way. This allows machines to participate and help humans to use the Internet information space in a flexible and reasonable manner.

This thesis presents the theoretical background, the architecture, and the prototype implementation of a concept that aims in utilising current semantic Web technologies. This concept is called Semantic Clipboard and allows users to process semantic annotated data from different sources at various desktop applications (i.e., target applications). For example, semantically annotated data about persons
processed by the Semantic Clipboard may create a new contact at desired contact management applications.

Data sources conform the syntactic structure of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and represent information in accordance with vocabularies that are defined by ontologies. Depending on the target application the semantic of data will be determined. For example, data about invoices may generate a new transfer in some business software or a new appointment containing the information about the payment date in a calendaring application.

For the demonstration of the concept a prototype with core functinality has been developed in the course of this thesis. The processing of three ontologies (i.e., foaf, iCal, and vCard) is provided. Since these ontologies describe information about contacts or events, Microsoft Outlook which is capable of handling information of that kind was implemented as target application.