Between 2006 and 2008 it was funded by a European Union research project of the same name[2] that grouped together industrial and academic actors to develop various Semantic Desktop technologies.

[5] On a technical level, NEPOMUK-KDE allowed associating metadata to various items present on a normal user's desktop such as files, bookmarks, e-mails, and calendar entries.

As the KDE SC 4 series of releases progressed, it became apparent that NEPOMUK was not delivering the performance and user experience that had initially been anticipated.

As a result of this, in KDE SC 4.13 a new indexing and semantic search technology Baloo was introduced, with a short transition period allowing applications to be ported and data to be migrated before the removal of NEPOMUK.

The Java implementation uses the Sesame RDF store and the Aperture[10] framework for integrating with other desktop applications such as mail clients and browsers.