SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, developed by Microsoft Research, deploys social network information for organizing information, helping users to organize their email in Outlook. A quote: “The coolest thing to me,’ Brush says, “is the power of collecting and presenting ‘simple information.’ I was surprised and pleased by how much power you can get from simply counting the e-mails you send to people and using that information to organize e-mail for users. Social information is very powerful.” It looks like we are on the right track with NEPOMUK and the Social Semantic Desktop: social networking information is relevant for assessing all information that we get and also send - not only email, but instant messaging, documents, websites, VOIP calls etc. Developing open standards is the challenge in front of of us. FOAF is a beginning, but we need far more: standards and protocols for dissemination of information and documents within social networks, ranking of information etc. Develping these standards is an important aspect of the NEPOMUK project.
