Nepomuk: Advanced Meta-Data as an Open Standard

I noticed that there was this strangely named daemon running during my KDE 4 session:

andrew    6275  0.0  0.2  71748  5072 ?        Sl   Nov09   0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukserver
andrew    6288  0.0  0.4  45640  7708 ?        S    Nov09   0:03 /usr/bin/nepomukservicestub nepomukstorage
andrew    6289  0.0  0.2  31464  4092 ?        S    Nov09   0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukservicestub nepomukontologyloader
andrew    6290  0.0  0.2  31328  4344 ?        S    Nov09   0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukservicestub nepomukfilewatch

A quick google later and I came to the Nepomuk web site. Apparently it is a standard supported by quite a few organizations, including IBM, HP, Mandriva, and SAP to name a few. The KDE community has picked up on this standard, and implemented it within the base KDE libraries. Presumably it's built so that the storage of metadata is a generic API so that other desktop environments or operating systems could read and write the same metadata.

This is awesome in so many ways. Currently, metadata stores are largely incompatible with each other. When I mount a Vista network share on OS X, it doesn't know anything about the source of files downloaded off of the web, though both OS's have similar warning features. OS X's Spotlight data stores are only accessible by OS X, and Vista (or Linux) have no way to query them for search results over the network.

As as side note, I've now enabled anonymous commenting for blog entries. So feel free to comment if you've had any experience with this standard!