Organizing and Integrating Knowledge on the Desktop with Repositories

The institutional repository, as a collection of research knowledge, is being encouraged to integrate with the researchers desktop environment. However, the desktop metaphor used on personal computer systems provides only limited abilities to organize an individuals information; the same is true for the digital library metaphor adopted by repositories. Neither environment provides many tools for relating its contents to external information sources. The need for automatically organizing information on the desktop to meet a users various needs to accomplish knowledge tasks has been identified by researchers but there is still no widely-adopted solution to tackle it. Semantic web concepts are being used to organize web data into structures that enable machines to interpret and combine it easily with other information to build knowledge. In this paper we discuss the need for an organization mechanism for the desktop that will help integrate desktop data with other data from repositories and from the web, or vice versa. 1