KDE 4 saw the introduction of NEPOMUK, the foundations for the "Social Semantic Desktop". The idea behind Semantic desktops is to make it possible for computers to identify meaningful relations between files and real-world people and relationships. These relations can then be exploited to help the user find their data. Read the full MIT Technology Review article on the project to learn why it "might be the semantic desktop that actually survives" and see how its inclusion in KDE is making it accessible to end users during its development process, and read on for a brief overview of how NEPOMUK works.



NEPOMUK offers a combination of automatically created metadata (such as document modification dates and music file tags) with user-created comments and more complex relationships such as that between an email attachment and the sender and recipients of an email. Files can then be found by using a search combining several items of metadata rather than relying only on keywords. NEPOMUK aims to go a step further than other similar projects by making it easy for members of a community to share their accumulated metadata and to transfer files with the collected metadata intact.

Posted on Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:01:13 +0000 at http://dot.kde.org/2008/12/28/mit-techn ... esktop-kde