PIM is the Killer App of the Semantic Web

In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee not only stated that HTTP URIs could have been designed without the double slashes at the beginning (with which I actually disagree: it adds uniqueness and recognizabillity to the whole thing), another important fact somehow gets missing in this interview: when asked to explain the Semantic Web in a nutshell, Tim gives concrete examples of a navigation system in your car that is aware of your calendar and knows where to take you to your next appointment.

Now, this is exactly what Semantic Personal Information Management is all about: your calendar, your location, and your next meeting all belong to your Personal Sphere of Information. Quite certainly you won't like to publish all these data on the public Web, but quite certainly you will want your personal computing devices to be aware of this information and behave accordingly.

What Linked Open Data is to public data, Semantic Personal Information Management is for your private data. And the nice thing is: these two worlds are not separate, they complement each other perfectly. We will take care of that.