Ah, the word spreads. Excellent:

In the Semantic Web realm, dereferencable URIs offer the critical fabric that drive the giant global graph of interconnected data popularly referred to as Linked Data; a term also coined by Tim Berners-Lee in his Linked Data Design Note[1] and furthered by other articles such as "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" by Sauermann and Cygniak[2].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dereferenceable_Uniform_Resource_Identifier

So, I hope the URI crisis is over now, lets see how it turns out in the next years.

CORDIS, a page managed by the EU, hosts an article about the results of the NEPOMUK project. Again, Ansgar Bernardi gave a great interview and brought it to the point.

Semantic desktop paves the way for the semantic web


“For example, I was taking notes at a summer school we recently held in Malta and I was writing the information into a wiki application on my computer. With Nepomuk installed, each time I mentioned a speaker’s name I was given the opportunity to link to contact details and other data about that person I already had stored on the computer,” Bernardi, a researcher at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), explains.

And the ancient myths of NEPOMUK, tales of the past that are worth passed on :-)
"The idea of building a semantic desktop arose from the fact that one of our colleagues could not keep track of the girlfriends of his friends because they kept changing," Bernardi says. “Social networking sites such as Facebook only go half way towards solving the problem because they do not provide an actual assessment of relations between people based on all the information available to you and your interpretation of it… Much of that information is hidden on your computer in files, emails, contact books, pictures, in the names and structures of your folders. Nepomuk provides a more efficient way of managing that information."

Well, recently I drank a beer with the friend who had so many girlfriends and it appeared that he also kept forgetting his girlfriend's names...

One spin-off company from coordinating partner DFKI is in the process of being established, and Bernardi says others may follow.
Ha, thats me!