Meta Data

Nepomuk is all about metadata. There are basicly three kinds of metadata to be found on the desktop:

• Metadata that can be found in files stored on the local harddisk like tag information in audio files, timestamps, or simple indexed text. This metadata can be extracted and indexed at any time and is exactly the type of information current desktop search projects like Beagle or Strigi are based on.
• Metadata created manually by the user. In the most simple case this can be a comment to a file or an email. But it could also mean the grouping of several resources under one topic (tagging) and so on.
• The most interesting type of metadata is, however, the kind that cannot be extracted easily by an indexer and is not generated by the user manually. This includes for example the url of a file that is downloaded from the internet. Once saved on the local harddisk this information is lost. The same goes for the (rather popular) example of email attachments: Once an email attachment is saved to the local harddisk its connection to the email and with it the connection to the sender is lost. These are just two examples relating to the source of files. There are many more.

The target of the Nepomuk project is to provide the user with facilities to create, manage, query, and thus, exploit this metadata in powerful ways.

Existing Features

Nepomuk is a relatively young project and as such, is only at the beginning of providing the targetted features.

Integration with Dolphin

Nepomuk allows to tag, rate, and comment your files through Dolphin, the KDE 4 file manager. This way files can be grouped in addition to simple folder placement.

Strigi - File Analyzing and Indexing

Nepomuk integrates with Strigi, the file analyzer, to index file metadata. This allows to perform combined queries on file metadata and information such as tags and ratings.

Fetch, Nepomuk, Fetch is an interesting read on this topic.

Future Development

Future development includes a search service that is accessible from all KDE applications, providing powerful query capabilities wherever useful. An example are virtual folders in KMail allowing to filter emails based on arbitrary complex semantic queries.