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NEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop
Networked Environment for Personal Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge
NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop.
Impact
NEPOMUK addressed the every-day activities of individual knowledge workers.
The social semantic desktop was designed to support the personal aspects of knowledge work by developing tools for knowledge articulation and visualization, the interfaces and data structures of the personal semantic web, and integration of personal work process support. It supports the social aspects of communication, distributed collaboration, and social exchange by providing solutions for distributed search and storage and of semantic social networks and knowledge exchange.
NEPOMUK aimed at maximum possible uptake by concentrating on integrative and open architectures and actively promoting community involvement.
The project delivered a freely available open-source framework for social semantic desktops, and a rich set of standardized interfaces and reference implementations. The project result formed the basis for commercial exploitation via consulting activities (introducing the new possibilities of knowledge work support to users), tool development (integrating new services into the framework), and application-specific solution development (adapting the social semantic framework to the needs of particular or branch-specific industrial application scenarios).
The Linux KDE developer community has shown interest in the NEPOMUK model. A group of developers have started to implement the NEPOMUK interfaces within the Linux KDE and IBM Eclipse environment.
Main innovation
Human knowledge work mainly consists of the reception, interpretation and structuring of information, the explicit articulation of thoughts in suitable representations (like texts and pictures), and the sharing, exchange and discussion of such resources with other people. The way people proceed in this is heavily influenced by the tools they use: The personal workspace - and the personal computer in particular - support and reflect the individual ways of information processing, thought articulation, and knowledge sharing across social and organizational networks.
NEPOMUK worked to realize and deploy a comprehensive solution - methods, data structures, and a set of tools - for extending the personal computer into a collaborative environment, which improves the state of art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organizing information created by single or group efforts. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop. This enhanced personal workspace (the Desktop) is Semantic since it gives information a well-defined meaning, making it processable by the computer. It is Social since it supports the interconnection and exchange with other desktops and their users.
Main visible results of NEPOMUK are
- the architecture and implemented middleware of the Social Semantic Desktop, published as open-source software and where relevant submitted to semantic web standardization processes,
- an active scientific and user community that adopts the results of NEPOMUK and continues to extend them to their needs,
- a set of reference solutions in use at SAP, PRC, or Institut Pasteur, and a body of documented experience and methodological know-how gained in their application domains.
More details
- General Presentation (PDF, 227KB)
- Poster (PDF, 80KB)
- Flyer (PDF, 73KB)
- ICT Results feature: Semantic desktop paves the way for the semantic web (25 November 2008)
Researchers in the NEPOMUK project have developed software to make finding information on your computer and sharing it with others considerably easier. In the process, they may have solved the chicken and egg problem that has held back development of the semantic web. - 10.000 NEPOMUK downloads (26 November 2008). Aperture is an open source component developed under the FP6 project NEPOMUK. It is a piece of software that looks at all the files you have on your computer and tries to figure out what they are about and how they are related to one another and to your tasks.
- Annual Report 2008 (PDF, 331KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF, 634KB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF, 112KB)
- Internetnews.com article: Open Source Semantic Desktop Is Coming (13 July 2007)
- IST Results News in Brief: Future changes to the desktop (22 February 2006)
- Computer Business Review article: Mandriva means to help Semantic desktop project (20 February 2006)
- ZDNet.fr article: Nepomuk, leprojet européen de PC sémantique, sur les rails (17 February 2006)
- NEPOMUK is part of the overall scientific and technical vision gathered under SemanticDesktop.org. Interested persons are invited to subscribe to the mailing list in order to participate in the public exchange of opinions and ideas on the semantic
- NEPOMUK is widely discussed in several communities. The NEPOMUK Blog Echo collects comments and remarks in blogs and similar media
- NEPOMUK website and NEPOMUK public open-source development platform
Administrative Details
- NEPOMUK (FP6-027705) is an Integrated Project of the European Union's 6th Framework Programme - call 4.
- NEPOMUK started on 1 January 2006 and finished on 31 December 2008 (duration: 36 months). Total EU funding: 11.500.000 EUR.
- 16 partners from 6 European countries were involved in the project.
List of Participants
- German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence - DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany
- International Business Machines (IBM) - IBM Product Distribution Ltd., Ireland
- SAP AG, Germany
- Hewlett-Packard Galway Ltd, Galway, Ireland
- Thales SA, France
- PRC Group - The Management House S.A., Greece
- EDGE-IT, France
- Cognium Systems, France
- National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
- Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
- Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, Germany
- L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany
- Institute of Communication and Computer Systems of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece
- Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden
- Università de la Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland
- Irion Management Consulting GmbH, Germany
Contact Persons
- Dr. Ansgar Bernardi
- DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122
- 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
- Tel: +49-631-20575-105
Events in connection with NEPOMUK
- Presentation (PDF, 3.082KB) at the Call-3 in Motion Event in Luxembourg on 13 December 2007
- Semantic Desktop Hands-On Workshop
- Freie Universität, Berlin, April 2007
- NEPOMUK presentation (1.450KB)
- ISWC2006 Conference held a workshop on 'The Semantic Desktop', presented a paper on 'Semantic Desktop 2.0: The Gnowsis Experience', presented poster and demo on the same topic. The workshop intensified connections to various industrial and academic partners of NEPOMUK.