After three weeks of parental leave after the birth of my second daughter (this should get me some comments even if the technical crap will not) and two weeks of catching up and preparing for the KDE 4.7 feature freeze I finally found the piece of mind to blog. Another year, another Google Summer of Code, and again Nepomuk got three students: Phaneendra Hegde, Smit Shah, and Swair Shah. (I suspected it with Vishesh, now I know: India loves Nepomuk!)

The three of them have great projects and I am very excited to see their results:

Phaneendra Hegde – Fancy Bookmarking

Phaneeddra’s project proposal outlines the development of a bookmarking tool for Konqueror and Rekonq, which allows users to link web pages to projects, tasks, people, files etc. and hence providing a effective bookmark management system. This is something I have wanted for quite some time. Instead of organizing your bookmarks in folders and sub-folders which grow impossibly big you relate the pages to things like people and projects, tag them, rate them, add comments, and so on. This allows to not only search for the web pages through the standard Nepomuk query facilities but also to browse your way to the wanted pages by means of tools like Ginkgo (more about that next time).

Smit Shah (Who) – Metadata Writeback

So far Nepomuk indexes all your files and lets you search or display that data. But changing it in Nepomuk did not trigger an update of the corresponding data in the file. Smit sets out to change that with his Metadata Writeback Project. The idea is rather simple: he will create a new service that hosts a new system of plugins that can write certain types of metadata. His first plugin will be based on TagLib allowing to update music file metadata directly in Nepomuk. This project should finally allow to use Nepomuk as a full-featured backend for applications like Amarok and Digikam.

Swair Shah – Nepomuk Project Integration

Swair will be working on Project Integration. Behind this simple title hides the idea to convert your desktop into a project management tool. The two main components are a project manager which allows to create and modify project resources that are stored in Nepomuk and a service that maintains the currently active project. The latter will allow to easily relate resources one is currently working with to the project and the other way around access resources related to the project. This integrates nicely with the already existing Nepomuk context service which maintains a single arbitrary resource as the current one.

Those are the projects for this year. While last year we also had three students but this year is very much different: Vishesh Handa steps in as second mentor and not only makes my life easier but also managed to get the three students interested in the first place. I cannot state this enough: Vishesh is a blessing for the Nepomuk project.