NEPOMUK Deliverable D7.3: Eclipse Community Involvement

NEPOMUK Deliverable D7.3: Eclipse 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.

While the Nepomuk report D7.2 - KDE Community Involvement described the outcomes of the Nepomuk-KDE initiative, the main goal of the work described in this report centers around the steps that have been undertaken to get the Eclipse community involved in Nepomuk. To this end, an analysis of the existing community and of the relevant projects already ongoing has been carried out, a Nepomuk Eclipse community platform has been started, and a RCP-based reference implementation of Nepomuk core components has been developed. These activities all together comprise the Nepomuk-Eclipse sub-project.

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. The Nepomuk-Eclipse project was presented to several audiences interested in Eclipse technologies, and synergies with potential similar projects have been identified.

A first version of a Nepomuk demonstrator using Eclipse Rich Client Platform (Eclipse RCP) technology has been designed. Eclipse RCP is the minimal set of Eclipse plug-ins needed to build a rich desktop application. It consists of a development framework including tools for dealing with text, forms, actions and any other component needed to create advanced applications. The Nepomuk Eclipse RCP demonstrator is dubbed PSEW, standing for "P2P Semantic Eclipse Workbench". PSEW introduces a user interface for interacting with the services provided by the Nepomuk components RDF API, RDF repository and DataWrapper. As of July 2007, PSEW lets the user launch the indexing process of desktop resources, explore the extracted metadata and complete it by manual annotations. Future versions of the prototype will provide enhanced semantic features, will include the capacity to share the local indexes over a P2P network using the Nepomuk distributed index, and will put into practice the Nepomuk community detecter and labeller.

The PSEW prototype will be used and extended by several Nepomuk case studies, serving as a foundation for an Eclipse based user interface to the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop. The upcoming versions of PSEW will include P2P capabilities, user context handling, social features and advanced visualization capabilities.

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

The availability of the implementations of the Nepomuk specification on top of the two frameworks KDE and Eclipse RCP paves the way for fruitful comparisons. It is expected that cross-fertilization between the two communities will take place, hence bolstering the adoption and the further enhancement of the Nepomuk standards.