Mandriva to participate in NEPOMUK

The press release is available below and on our website:
http://www.mandriva.com/fr/company/press/pr/


Press release

Mandriva to participate in NEPOMUK, a ¤17 million project aimed at
creating a Social Semantic Desktop 


Paris, February 16th - Mandriva, the publisher of the popular Mandriva
Linux operating system, today announced that its EDGE-IT subsidiary
has won a seat in the NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop project, funded
under the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme. The total
project budget is ¤17 million, of which ¤1.8 million are reserved to
EDGE-IT. Funding from the EU represents 50% of the budget. Major
partners of the project includes DFKI, SAP, Thales, and IBM (full list
available online, see project website below). 

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
http://www.mandriva.com