CeBIT 2010: Cluug organises Windows with semantic desktop

Online organisation is coming to the desktop, as Austrian company Gnowsis is taking semantic web ideas to your email, calendar and documents.

Called Cluug, it scans the text of your documents, emails, contacts and more. Then, when you look at a calendar event, it produces links to your related content, as well as bits and pieces from the web, much in the same way as the "you may also like" tool on the right hand side of this very webpage.

"It reads your docs, contacts - the goal is to read everything you come into contact with you life," explained Dr Leo Sauermann, founder of Gnwosis, as he demonstrated the alpha version of Cluug to IT PRO this week at CeBIT.

Users can also easily make their own links between objects, tying a spreadsheet to an email, or a weather forecast to a travel document, for example. For web-based email like Gmail, you'll need to make your links by hand using a quick automated button.

"Search is nice, but it's not how we humans work," he explained, saying we prefer suggestions and recommendations, and to make our own links between documents.

Dr Sauermann explained that we already do this, but we store the links in our heads - and lose them by forgetting.

By automating the process, Cluug could save 30 minutes a day in hunting for lost files, trying to remember what something was saved.

Like Outlook organiser Xobni, Cluug makes use of Outlooks programming APIs. He said Microsoft has made Outlook wide-open for extensions. Unlike Xobni, Cluug works across the desktop and lets users make their own links between documents.

Cluug came out of a KDE Linux project two years ago. "I'm a Windows guy, so I wanted to make it for Windows," Dr Sauermann said.

As of yesterday, 50 alpha testers had signed up for the project, which is still very much under development. Cluug needs about 300 to 350 testers, with a beta expected this summer. If you want to help out, you can sign up to test Cluug here.

Read on for more news from CeBIT 2010 here.

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