The presentation of the results of five mini-projects on Saturday, 13 september 2008, marked the successful conclusion of this year's NEPOMUK Summer School.

Participants, Lecturers, and Tutors

The NEPOMUK summer school took place september 7-13 in Sliema, Malta. 28 Students from 12 different countries spent the week learning about semantic technologies and the Social Semantic Desktop in particular. While the mornings were dedicated to theoretical and conceptual lectures, the afternoons were spent in guided hands-on sessions which allowed to collect experiences with the new techniques. Lectures and tutoring were performed by senior researchers from the NEPOMUK project team. Keeping balance between hard work and hard party, the evenings were dedicated to enjoying Malta by boat trips, visits, music, and social events.

Thursday afternoon all students grouped in small teams and started to worked on miniprojects of their own, aimed at using the newly-gained know-how to investigate and realize new, creative, and funny ideas. The groups presented a total of five prototypes and interaction designs on Saturday morning as the concluding highlight of the summer school.

Top-rated presentations were the semantic chat "Chatamuk" and the interaction paradigm "File@Pile".

"Chatomuk" presented a Semantic Chat which extends the traditional chat ? which allows to exchange just text messages between participants ? towards the sharing of enhanced information items. Such semantically-enhanced chat messages allow the users to immediately access related background information stored on their own computers, thus creating a much richer user experience and better chat performance.

"File@Pile" showed how the content analysis and document classification services of the Social Semantic Desktop can help the user to manage large amounts of available information: For any issue of interest ? being it business or private ? the user may name a "pile" to collect the associated information. The system helps by automatically sorting all kinds of information, like e.g. Chats, web browsing, e-mail, documents, into the appropriate piles, so the users find all relevant material in a single, context-adequate location.

Further projects were "1.2 times better", a draft of an iconic interface suitable to cross language barriers; "Share Malta" showing how people can profit from the improved sharing of information and their interpretation which is made possible by the Social Semantic Desktop; and "Doost", an automatic task handling application.

Working on their mini projects, the students proved their familiarity with the new techniques learned during the summer school, including the NEPOMUK framework, the concepts and details of semantic annotation, the generation and use of scenarios and video prototypes, and demonstrated that complex applications can be realized quickly by mashing up the available components. Operative prototypes presented convincing integrations with the available NEPOMUK services.

"It has been a great experience working in such a collaborative setting" says Stephanie, a computer science student at university of malta. "I got insights into large research projects, learned a lot, and I enjoyed being creative and having the opportunity to express myself. I will miss everyone" she concludes.

"It was a great experience working with different people from different cultures, with different backgrounds and different opinions" adds Samur, master student in computer science at the Pontifical Universidade Catholica at Rio de Janeiro. " It was the most important experience in my professional life".

"Learning the new technologies and those new techniques for fast prototyping and expressing ideas about an innovative project have been a wonderful experience for me" concludes Nuno, professor at ISEP polytechnical school of engineering in Porto, Portugal."The encouraging discussions have been an excellent personal and professional experience"

Hung, PhD student in his final year at the University Sud of Paris, adds: "The experience about semantic technology will greatly help me in my own research".

Ioana, research assistant at DERI in Galway, Ireland, feels "meeting the people whose names I have read on many papers was so fascinating. I throughoutly enjoyed the intensive and inspiring cooperation at this summer school"

"I was pretty fascinated by the inheritly interdisciplinary work. It was interesting to see how all the pieces fit together" comments Navid, PhD student at Università svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.

Leaving the NEPOMUK Summer School after one week of intensive collaboration was hard for students and lecturers alike, as this successful event brought new insights, valuable feedback, and a lot of fun to everybody involved.

The Linux.com online magazine published an inspiring article entitled Nepomuk and KDE to introduce the semantic desktop by Bruce Byfield, online at http://www.linux.com/feature/144853.

A report describing the involvement of the Mozilla community into the Nepomuk project is now available from the Nepomuk Web site at D7-4.

Here's the executive summary of the report:

To this end, a strategy similar to the one adopted for the KDE and Eclipse communities has been followed. An analysis of the existing community and of the relevant projects already ongoing has been carried out, a Nepomuk-Mozilla community platform has been started, and the specification of a reference implementation of Nepomuk core components based on Mozilla XPCOM architecture has been laid down. These activities all together comprise the Nepomuk-Mozilla sub-project.

Given the importance of the Mozilla platform eco-system and of its growing importance on the desktop, it appeared crucial from the outset to the Nepomuk Consortium to provide a demonstrator of the Nepomuk capabilities on top of the Mozilla platform.

This report follows the reports D7.2 - KDE community involvement and D7.3 - Eclipse community involvement, of which it reuses the global structure: the work carried out and the strategy for involving external contributors are similar to the Nepomuk-KDE and Nepomuk-Eclipse initiatives indeed, even though the target communities are different in nature.

In order to present the project and to raise interest across the community, a dedicated Web site and a public mailing-list have been set up at the following URL: http://nepomuk-mozilla.semanticdesktop.org. The Nepomuk-Mozilla project will be submitted to the FOSDEM 2008 Mozilla developer room for widening the number of partakers in the project and for increasing synergies with other projects that share similar concerns.

The specification and use cases of the target Nepomuk-Mozilla prototype have been defined and are presented in this report. The objective of the prototype is to implement the Nepomuk social semantic desktop vision on top of XPCOM and XUL components. This prototype will make it possible to annotate any and all Web data (including parts of Web pages) or local files from Firefox, emails from Thunderbird, to store the annotations in the Nepomuk metadata store and to share them using the Nepomuk P2P social layer. The advantage of using a common metadata store on the desktop lies in sharing annotations and ontologies across the applications instead of having them burried into each application information system. This paves the way for a Mozilla instrumented ``Personal Semantic Web''.

In parallel to the development of the Nepomuk-Mozilla prototype, the focus will be brought in year 2008 on the involvement of more Mozilla developers into the Nepomuk-Mozilla project, on presenting the project to a wider audience on the occasion of Mozilla related events, and on increasing the presence of the project on the Web.

The availability of the three implementations of the Nepomuk specification on top of the three frameworks KDE4, Eclipse RCP and Mozilla paves the way for fruitful comparisons and hopefully for cross-fertilization between the three communities, hence bolstering the adoption and collaborative enhancements of the Nepomuk standards.

The Nepomuk Consortium was represented at the annual SolutionsLinux fair in Paris. That was the occasion to present the current advancement of the KDE4 semantic capabilities.

Presented slides:

• ODP format: Nepomuk-KDE4.SolutionsLinux-20080129.odp
• PDF format: Nepomuk-KDE4.SolutionsLinux-20080129.pdf

The Soprano development team is proud to announce the release of Soprano 2.0, the completely revamped stable version of the powerful desktop RDF framework.

The Soprano project was born from the QRDF prototype by Daniele Galdi and Duncan Mac-Vicar when the need for a proper RDF storage solution for the KDE implementation of Nepomuk technologies arose. In the Nepomuk project, all data is stored as RDF quadruples, and as such Soprano is one of the core elements for Nepomuk in KDE. Today Soprano is developed within the KDE source code repository as a direct dependency of the KDE Nepomuk components.

Soprano is a pluggable open-source RDF storage, parsing, and serialization framework based on QT4. Soprano is targeted at desktop applications that need an RDF solution for (meta)data storage. From the beginning its API has been optimized for easy usage and simplicity.

Soprano has a wide range of features, the most important ones include:

• Storage backends for Redland and Sesame2
• RDF parser and serialization plugins for Raptor (rdf+xml, Trig, Turtle) and NQuads
• An iterator-based design for query result iteration and triple/quadruple listing
• Hierarchical model (graph) design allowing to stack different filters on top of an RDF repository
• Full support for contexts (aka named graphs or RDF quadruples)
• A rule-based forward inference engine
• A full-text index based on CLucene which allows fast queries on literal statements
• A server and client library including a simple daemon implementation
• A powerful command line tool to control a Soprano server or directly modify and query a Soprano repository

The Soprano source code package can be retrieved from http://soprano.sourceforge.net.

This message was originally posted to the nepomuk-kde@semanticdesktop.org mailing-list: [1].

Sebastian uploaded a video showcasing the current status of the NEPOMUK-KDE project on Google Video.


The NEPOMUK-KDE project aims to implement semantic features in the KDE desktop based on Semantic Web technologies such as RDF. This video shows the current state of development (8 min 52 sec).

This release bears the mark of the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop - a major research initative where research institutes and commercial companies from around Europe. Aperture is used as one of the pillars of a next-generation platform that will revolutionize the way people organize and use the data stored on their computers. The input from the Nepomuk Community drove us to implement a host of new features that make Aperture more useful, more flexible and more powerful.

http://aperture.sourceforge.net

The Nepomuk Soprano team is proud to present the first preview release of the next generation of Soprano, an object-oriented RDF framework. A lot of effort and work has gone into Soprano 2 and the result is a highly usable and intuitive API that fulfills all your RDF needs.

Soprano is an object-oriented RDF framework written entirely in C++/QT4. It is targetted at applications that need RDF data storage on the desktop.

Soprano 2 introduces many new features and improvements. Read more from the new Soprano web site at http://soprano.sourceforge.net/.

See also the Nepomuk-KDE web site at http://nepomuk-kde.semanticdesktop.org.

A very first version of the NEPOMUK PSEW prototype is available from the NEPOMUK subversion. PSEW stands for P2P Semantic Eclipse Workbench The installation procedure is available from the PSEW page on the Nepomuk-Eclipse wiki. You can read more about the Nepomuk Eclipse approach in the deliverable D7.3.

The Mandriva NEPOMUK team was interviewed by Sean Michael Kerner from InternetNews.com about the current status of the developments. Read more at http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3688606.