NEPOMUK Deliverable D7.4: Mozilla Community Involvement

NEPOMUK Deliverable D7.4: Mozilla Community Involvement

Executive Summary

To be really successful, the Nepomuk project needs not only to realize and deploy an innovative approach for collaborative knowledge work, but also to integrate the Nepomuk framework into mainstream desktop environments and development platforms. The Nepomuk community initiative focuses on involving at least the KDE, Eclipse and Mozilla communities of users and developers into the Nepomuk project.

The main goal of the work described in this report is the involvement of the Mozilla community into the Nepomuk project. 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.