Project Summary

Administrative information

Administrative information
Start date	01. January 2006
End date	31. December 2008
Duration	36 months
Total EU funding	11.500.000 EUR
Synopsis	NEPOMUK-Synopsis.pdf

Synopsis

NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries.

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.

It will comprise a set of technical and methodological solutions for

• Supporting the knowledge life cycle, in particular the generation and exchange of personal thoughts via structured articulation in extended wiki-based semantic tools, goal-oriented organization by work process model integration, and sharing, exchange and alignment of metadata;
• the management of all relevant information in the personal workspace via cross-media and cross-application linking and browsing of information items based on standard semantic web data structures, together with un-intrusive metadata generation support;
• knowledge communication within social networks and distri- buted search and storage to build, maintain, and employ inter- workspace relations in large scale distributed scenarios.

NEPOMUK realizes an open-source framework which allows integration of thirdparty components via pluggable adaptors. The core components and approaches will be actively promoted in open development communities in order to reach an early large-scale uptake and feedback. Relevant interfaces and data structures will be submitted to the appropriate standardization committees like OASIS or W3C.

The technical work packages for the personal semantic desktop comprise tools for knowledge articulation and visualization, the interfaces and data structures of the personal semantic web, and integration of personal work process support.

The workpackages covering the social and distribution aspect tackle the issues of distributed search and storage and of semantic social networks and knowledge exchange. All technical work is united in an encompassing architecture work package. Four industrial and community case studies apply, adapt, and test the solution in knowledge work scenarios in different scales of distribution, organizational complexity, and application domains. A workpackage on dissemination and community activities will realize the intended large-scale uptake.

The project delivers a freely available open-source framework for social semantic desktops, and a rich set of standardized interfaces and reference implementations. The project result will form 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).