This month marks the conclusion of Nepomuk, the Social Semantic Desktop Project. The three-year project, which was focused on personal information management and sharing desktop data, wraps up having met its goals, which included:

  # Building the architecture, defining the ontologies (accessible at http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies), and bringing the concept to fruition, as well as enabling integration of the technology with a number of existing desktop applications;

  # The APERTURE development framework for getting data and metadata from many common file formats, and creating RDF data;

  # A KDE Linux desktop implementation of Nepomuk's core concepts; and

  # Four case studies in areas including bioscience, enterprise, and the Linux community to show how the technology can help information management in particular scenarios. For example, a case study was undertaken with the research department of software vendor SAP that revolved around using the technology to support work processes.

Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of the Knowledge Management Department at Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI, or the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Nepomuk's coordinator, explains the problems Nepomuk aimed to solve. The information people have on their personal computers is stored in a variety of ways, in different file types, as part of different applications, in email folders and browser bookmarks, and so on. To make sense out of that and bring the data you need together is hard.

"We want to give you the possibility to explicitly describe such relations, to interlink between information across different applications and different file formats, first of all to represent your information and to allow for automated services to help you in your information management," Bernardi says.

To this end of building the personal semantic web, the project employed existing Semantic Web standards as far as possible, starting with RDF as the data repository and database technology format, continuing with the idea of ontologies for representing the concepts in which users want to express themselves, and then employing communications protocols to allow interconnections between services.

"So you get the possibility to connect and interlink information on your computer regardless of application, file format and data structure," he says. But as they say, no man is an island. So to share such information, as well as the metadata created on these personal semantic desktop, requires the social semantic desktop, where peer to peer connections enabled by distributed storage and indexing lets users find information across different workplaces and personal computers, to exchange data and metadata as they see fit.

"You have access only to things that have been explicitly shared," Bernardi says. "So, if you install Nepomuk, you have the possiblity to say that for a particular file for a particular concept, share this, and you can even specify with whom to share and no one else will have access." This works through the use of a public key encryption system.

As of the middle of November there were more than 10,000 downloads for the Nepomuk tools. The Nepomuk project website, a wiki that contains pointers to numerous information such as public deliverables and publications, is http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org, and the prototype for download, technical documentation, source code, and a bug tracker facility is available in the NEPOMUK developer website at http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org. Community-specific activities maintain websites of their own; all of them are liked to from the NEPOMUK project website. The KDE developments, for example, can be found at http://nepomuk.kde.org. There is also a Nepomuk-Mozilla and Nepomuk-Eclipse implementation of the project underway.

Life after the Nepomuk project also includes expectations of sustained development within the KDE environment. Bernardi also notes that some of the project partners already have dedicated resources to accompany development beyond the duration of the project in the KDE area, including DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute) at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Number two on the list is the creation of a dedicated spin-off company which will sell a new PIM tool product and consulting services based on this work; the company is currently being funded, and Bernardi says DFKI has an excellent track record on this front, having spun off more than 50 companies in the past. The third activity, he says, is the creation and long term maintenance of a kind of legal body to serve as the communications axis and organizer for meetings and other events associated with the project, targeting industrial customers who want to know about the possibilities of the technology based on the Nepomuk project's experiences.