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.”

Sauermann compares Gnowsis’ business model to “the typical Californian startup approach: Start small, build something useful, bring it quickly to customers, improve from there.” Think of its initial release as a “tagging platform with a little semantics” that will help Gnowsis bootstrap the market and learn how to deliver a product which it can improve incrementally with more features as time goes on. The semantic desktop will be available as a low-priced option for consumers and a higher priced system for the enterprise.

“The platform has to be both web and desktop. We are good on the desktop and have a lot of experience there, but without a good web counterpart the software does not provide everything our customers want,” he says. “When people use the semantic desktop, they soon realize that sharing their data saves a lot of time. We are currently working on a web platform that allows just this: social exchange of semantic data.”

Gnowsis plans a software-as-a-service option and free downloadable and web-based try-out versions, as well.

To turn this into a viable business, Gnowsis will first address niche markets where it can provide a good feature on top of existing solutions. “I can’t say much about the exact niche market we will address first, but tagging e-mails will surely be part of it,” he says.

The founders are currently working on solving issues such as speed and memory consumption problems with the Windows and Mac versions. (A KDE Linux desktop implementation of Nepomuk’s core concepts exists, but Sauermann says that most companies want a semantic desktop for Windows.) Other technical challenges revolve around building a scalable Semantic web stack for the social exchange part of the product to work.

“That is easier today using highly scalable RDF stores, but we miss a lot of tooling on top. Look at how quickly an application can be built using Ruby-On-Rails and MySQL. I think this kind of productivity is missing for RDF,” Sauermann says. “If these issues are unsolvable, there is a good workaround: just don’t use RDF everywhere, fall back to relational databases for some parts.”

Sauermann says Gnowsis has been able to benefit from DFKI’s good track record of founding companies, and from the experience of many successful startups – that helped hm learn that it’s smart to build something good on something that works – and also that “building an architecture” as a means to an end can bite back. “We often end up building an architecture as a mean to satisfy our own inner nerd, so the challenge is to reduce the many possibilities to what is really useful,” he says.

He thinks Gnowsis is on the right track: “The good thing about our product is that it really addresses an itch to scratch — remembering how the e-mails and files are connected with each other.”

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