Nepomuk-Mozilla activities

This page contains ideas and a roadmap proposal for the development to be carried out within the http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org NEPOMUK project in 2007 and 2008. The objective is to annotate any and all Web data (including parts of Web pages) or local files from Firefox, emails from Thunderbird and to store the annotations in the default metadata store on Mandriva, i.e KDE4 metadata store. The advantage of using a common metadata store is to share annotations and ontologies across the applications instead of having them burried into each application information system, toward a "Personal Semantic Web". A first step consists of integrating Firefox and Thunderbird with the Nepomuk dbus service. A second step consists of harnessing this integration by developping addons for dealing with metadata, and to involve the community of Mozilla developers in the use of this shared desktop metadata store.

Nepomuk-Mozilla mailing list: http://lists.semanticdesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nepomuk-mozilla

Integration of Firefox and Thunderbird with the Nepomuk dbus service

The Nepomuk service is a service integrated in KDE4 which gives access to libnepomuk, a library for managing metadata from various applications. The metadata is then stored in http://soprano.sourceforge.net Soprano, "an open and pluggable RDF resource framework which is build on top of QT4. It provides RDF storage, RDF parsing, serialization, inference, and full text indexing in a C++ API."

Nepomuk KDE4 metadata library documentation.

The integration of Firefox with the Nepomuk server consists in issuing dbus calls to the Nepomuk service from Firefox. The same bridge should be established between Thunderbird and the Nepomuk server. A first step would consist of looking whether such a bridge is already available (in particular by discussing it with Mozilla Europe). If it is not available yet, we should provide specifications for it and implement it.

Links:

Firefox and Thunderbird developments harnessing the Nepomuk metadata service

Once the integration of Firefox and Thunderbird with dbus is achieved, we will develop a set of addons for Firefox and Thunderbird that will harness the KDE4 metadata service. Below is a proposal of a set of addons building on this integration. All the proposals below are meant to be developed in close collaboration with Mozilla team whenever possible.

1) Develop a XUL UI for associating metadata to Web pages or selections of pages from Firefox (note: see what can be reused from Firefox3 user interfaces for adding metadata to URIs). The metadata should then be stored in the KDE4 metadata store.

user right clicks on a Web page -> a contextual menu pops up
the menu contains the following actions: tag this page
if the user clicks "tag this page", a wizard pops up, displaying existing tags for that page if there are some already linked with that page, and letting the user (i) check other tags, which are retrieved from the metadata database as items having the type "Tag" in the Nepomuk Annotation Ontology (ii) associate a type with the page. Available types are the types having the type "rdf:type" in the metadata database. Such types can be for instance "Event", "City", etc. (iii) associate properties with the page, such as the ones (from the NAO and PIMO ontologies, and others) "Has start date", "Has end date", "Is chaired by" etc.

2) Set up the same UI for Thunderbird messages. Metadata has to be updated when an email is moved from one folder to another, or deleted.

3) Develop a Thunderbird extension for browsing emails by types or properties.

4) Develop a Firefox extension for browsing Web pages by types or properties.

5) Develop an integrated XUL UI for browsing Web pages, emails and local files by types or properties, and for annotating them.

7) Develop export/import and synchronization scripts for several Firefox applications dealing with metadata such as: Zotero, Scrapbook, ClearForest Gnosis, Firefox3 tag manager, TiddlySnip, Annozilla and others so that the user can import existing metadata into the common KDE4 metadata store. Then, get in touch with the Firefox developers for discussing a possible native storage of the addons metadata into the KDE4 metadata store when KDE4 is available.

8) Add a social layer for sharing metadata and files with friends and colleagues. A study on how this can be achieved is to be conducted. This involves looking deeply at AllPeers and other similar data sharing projects.

9) Make it possible to store a full text index of all browsed pages contents in the Nepomuk metadata store.

10) See how the KDE4 metadata store can access the Firefox3 store and conversely.

Roadmap proposal

December 2007: discuss with Mozilla-Europe about all this, and keep discussing during the whole 2008 year
31/1/2008: have a clear technical description on how we can integrate Firefox+Thunderbird with the Nepomuk dbus server
15/2/2008: first prototype of a Firefox/Thunderbird integration with the Nepomuk dbus server
28/2/2008: first XUL UI for metadata additions from Firefox and from Thunderbird (enhancement of what's possible in terms of tagging in Firefox3)
31/3/2008: integrated XUL UI for dealing with metadata on the desktop across files, emails, Web pages, selection of Web pages.
31/5/2008: have several external app. developers use the Firefox/Thunderbird/metadata dbus service integration.
30/6/2008:
- second version of the XUL UI for metadata
- specification of the social layer features and of the social layer architecture
31/12/2008:
- social layer implemented: share metadata and associated files between desktops
- third version of the bridge and of the UI
- third version of the XUL UI for metadata
- have many other external addons use the metadata service