The vision of the
Social Semantic Desktop defines a user’s personal information environment as a source and end-point of the Semantic Web: Knowledge workers comprehensively
express their information and data with respect to their own conceptualizations. Semantic Web languages and protocols are
used to formalize these conceptualizations and for coordinating local and global information access. From the way this vision
is being pursued in the NEPOMUK project, we identified several requirements and research questions with respect to knowledge
representation. In addition to the general question of the expressivity needed in such a scenario, two main challenges come
into focus: i) How can we cope with the heterogeneity of knowledge models and ontologies, esp. multiple knowledge modules
with potentially different interpretations? ii) How can we support the tailoring of ontologies towards different needs in
various exploiting applications?
In this paper, we present NRL, an approach to these two question that is based on named graphs for the modularization aspect
and a view concept for the tailoring of ontologies. This view concept turned out to be of additional value, as it also provides
a mechanism to impose different semantics on the same syntactical structure.
We think that the elements of our approach are not only adequate for the semantic desktop scenario, but are also of importance
as building blocks for the general Semantic Web.