Xesam and Nepomuk Desktop Ontologies Merge

Apr 30, 2009

Sebastian Trüg has announced that the Xesam vs. Nepomuk issue is settled and that they will merge into a single desktop ontology.

Both desktop ontologies had been undergoing parallel development in the past to define the metadata on a computer in a meaningful way and implement a social, semantic desktop. As Sebastian Trüg writes in his blog, "the Xesam ontology and NIE (Nepomuk Information Elements) both define classes and properties to describe desktop metadata ranging from id3 tags (artist, title, and so on) to emails and instant messaging." Trüg goes on: "All that was left to do was a merger. And that is what happened now. Sort of."

In the process, Nepomuk seems to have prevailed, supported by discussion on the freedesktop.org lists that generally advises updating the software and agrees that more and more projects are migrating to Nepomuk in that it proves to be more complete. Trüg didn't consider this a slam on Xesam. In fact, Nepomuk borrowed many ideas from Xesam and the advantages of the competitor could flow directly or through add-ons into Nepomuk.

Above all, says Trüg, care should go into unifying the NIE (Nepomuk) versions across applications. Strigi, KDEBase and Tracker already contain NIE code. To further discuss ontological issues, he established an Open Semantic Collaboration Architecture Foundation (OSCAF) platform on SourceForge.net.

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