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 personal information management and sharing of information via social and organizational channels.

After the revolution caused by the Macintosh in the 1980s, the Social Semantic Desktop is the only true sea-change seen in recent years on the desktop. It is a new computing paradigm that provides an advanced way to create, automate and structure information. The Social Semantic Desktop brings three major changes: the availability of contextual information on users' desktops, the shift from hierarchical to semantic storage of information, and advanced ways of assisting users in their day-to-day usage of computers. One common way to define the Social Semantic Desktop is to bill it as the technologies that allow computers to gather information in the same manner as the human brain does.

François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva, said: "NEPOMUK will result in revolutionary applications. Social Semantic Desktop represents a big opportunity to further extend the knowledge sharing functions offered by current technologies. Only a small portion of the aggregate power of the world's computers is effectively used today. Thanks to NEPOMUK, everyone will be able to get more out of computers, through new ways of searching information and working collaboratively. It's no surprise that such a key open source leader as Mandriva has been selected to contribute to the project: knowledge sharing is at the heart of the open source movement. We are proud to be part of the group that is building the next big thing in desktop computing."

NEPOMUK will develop a comprehensive framework for the Social Semantic Desktop and will integrate with common desktop tools and environments, including KDE, GNOME, Mozilla and Eclipse. Furthermore, NEPOMUK will actively integrate with open source user and developer communities.

Mandriva has several roles in the project. First, the company will participate in the definition of the infrastructure tools necessary for NEPOMUK. Mandriva will further organize and lead the community engineering around NEPOMUK. The company will use its expertise in building software communities to enable NEPOMUK to have the broadest and the strongest community support. Major software communities involved include those of KDE, Mozilla and Eclipse. One of the key goals of the community effort is to release common APIs for NEPOMUK. Mandriva will then take over the submission of NEPOMUK APIs to standards organizations, such as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the organization which defines the Web's standards.

Finally, as part of its involvement, Mandriva will implement NEPOMUK technologies into the Mandriva Club website, thus providing one of the first real-world applications of the project. The implementation will consist of developing a community help-desk platform with rich desktop extensions and P2P capabilities, bringing the collective intelligence of the community to a new level.
NEPOMUK project's web site: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
SemanticDesktop.org: http://www.semanticdesktop.org

About Mandriva
Mandriva, formerly known as Mandrakesoft, is the publisher of the popular Mandriva Linux operating system, one of the most full-featured and easy to use_proofread Linux systems. The company offers its enterprise, government, and educational customers a complete range of GNU/Linux and Open Source software and related services. Mandriva products are available in more than 120 countries. Born in 1998, the company has offices in the United States, France and Brazil. Mandriva is traded on Paris Euronext Marché Libre (ISIN Code: FR0004159382/MLMAN; Reuters code: MAKE.PA) and the US OTC market (stock symbol MDKFF).
Press Contact: Kadjo N'Doua press at mandriva.com / + 33 1 40 41 67 67 https://mandriva.com