With the continuesly growing pile of documents our old standard ways of storing information grows stale; we can no longer find important parts of a document because there just is too much of it. And normal storing of documents in directories and other hierarchies turns out to be too painful.

Introduce metadata; the word stands for data describing other data. Which in the case of KOffice is information stored inside of a document describing details like the author, the amount of times the document has been edited etc. However; to be able to replace normal storage of documents with something more advanced we need to add a lot more information to the documents.

The project Nepomuk is meant to help out enormously here. Nepomuk is meant to store not only metadata but also references to other metadata. Just read the homepage for more.

Usecases

Anna is a freelancer and she has to create a news letter with images and text she gets from her contacts. Some of the text comes from Jabber, other comes from emails. Similar with the images she uses for the document. Anna gets pieces of data from various contacts, and not all of this data is perfect. Sometimes she gets slightly different text for the same event or two pictures for an event while there should only be one. It also often happens that multiple versions of a paragraph of text are exchanged via email. When a second photo comes in for an event that is supposed to have only one photo, she checks inside KWord where the original photo came from. She can than get specific data on who send her the photo and if it came in via email or via jabber. And find out if the photo maybe was meant to be temporary and so its useful to find the originating email where this would be written. Paragraphs of text in KWord coming from an email can also be right clicked to open the originating email. This allows Anna to check the date it was send to make sure she has the latest version.