Research/Nepomuk

Introduction

NEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop - is funded by the European Community under FP6-027705 IST. The overall project goal is to extend the personal computer into a collaborative environment, focusing on personal data management and the provisioning of information, potentially involving online collaboration by individuals or groups. The desktop aspect of the project is where Nepomuk-KDE comes in: a freely and widely available platform which contains the NEPOMUK results.

Ontologies

Desktop ontologies define whom a file belongs to, what rating a user assigns to it and which people are related to the file or contents thereof. While adding all the semantic metadata is a tedious task, there is a reward once it is present: Searching for specific information becomes a lot more accurate and to the point. Nepomuk-KDE uses Soprano to access ontologies stored in RDF (resource description format).

Strigi

Strigi is a search engine which will be present in the upcoming KDE 4. With the advent of Nepomuk-KDE, Strigi has access to desktop ontologies. Rapid access to information is one of the goals of this integration, which is depicted in the following diagram.

File:Research/Nepomuk/Architecture.png

Demonstration

While the development is still going on, those who run the latest prereleases of KDE 4 can already have a glimpse at semantic desktop technologies.

More information

More information on the project work and results can be found at: nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org