Engineering a Semantic Desktop for Building Historians and Architects

We analyse the requirements for an advanced semantic support of users—building historians and architects—of a multi-volume encyclopedia of architecture from the late 19th century. Novel requirements include the integration of content retrieval, content development, and automated content analysis based on natural language processing.

We present a system architecture for the detected requirements and its current implementation. A complex scenario demonstrates how a desktop supporting semantic analysis can contribute to specific, relevant user tasks.