Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The promised spin-off from the open source NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge) social semantic desktop project and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has arrived – sort of. Gnowsis is currently in stealth mode, with plans to search for its first round of venture capital funding this fall.

Gnowsis currently has searches underway for additional co-founders and other employees to join founders Leo Sauermann and Bernhard Schandl. Sauermann, who has been working under deputy head of the Knowledge Management Department Ansgar Bernardi at DFKI, published the first version of a semantic desktop in his diploma thesis in 2003. Bernhard, a researcher at University of Vienna who has worked on the MobiSem project to define the requirements of mobile semantic applications, is finishing his PhD thesis in the field of semantic desktop infrastructures.

Aiming to move research into practice, the not-for-profit company has applied to the Austrian incubator inits.at for government support. The Vienna-based inits.at was founded by universities and the city to start up technological companies from research results, and its advisory board accepted Gnowsis’ business plan, Sauermann says.

“Their requirements are quite high and we are happy to have their approval,” he says. “The funding we get from inits.at is around 40,000 euro, and it’s bound to legal advice, business advice, and paying external contractors.”

The company officially joins the incubation program next week, and following that it expects to hunt for more government funding. Its own current funds total about 50,000 EURO, Sauermann says, noting that there are some excellent public programs in Austria for pre-seed funding. The founders met in February with investors at the Web 3.0 Venture Academy in Brussels, organized by e-unlimited, and Sauermann says reaction to the team and plan has been positive.

Gnowsis plans to have a working product in the hands of customers in the summer, and it expects to be able to move forward with VC funding come September. The new semantic desktop product — based on the results of the NEPOMUK project, EPOS (Evolving Personal to Organizational Knowledge Spaces Project), and the gnowsis project (a reference implementation of parts of the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop framework) — is designed to help users organize e-mails, files, and web-pages in one semantic network.

“We have a high goal in mind which we want to achieve over the next years: helping people to remember facts,” says Sauermann.

He says that over the last years of research, he’s seen interest in the work from many companies in a variety of industries, including mobile application developers and phone companies that want to improve the usability of cell phones; they’re looking to solve problems around storing semantic data or automatically generating semantic data from text. For example, there’s been interest from those involved with Nokia’s MAEMO software platform, which is mostly based on open source code and powers mobile devices such as the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. “They started to evaluate the ontologies we developed for the NEPOMUK project,” says Sauermann. “It didn’t take much to explain the ideas to them, as they are technically excellent people and learned a lot by themselves. In general, we told a lot of people that the Semantic Desktop solves the problem of linking personal knowledge.”

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