Hello 👋

I'm a software architect, web developer, and music teacher based in Germany. I teach violin, play in orchestras, take on client projects, and — in the gaps between all of that — I keep building toward an idea I've had since university: a personal semantic data fabric. Basically a system that knows where your files actually live, what you were doing when you made them, who else can get to them, and what they mean to you — built around privacy and data sovereignty from the start.

The Semantic Desktop grabbed me hard when KDE's Nepomuk showed up in 2007. I still want it to exist. So I kept building.

You can sponsor me on Ko-Fi (which works with PayPal):

What I'm building

semanticdesk.top is a personal data sovereignty project — open source, self-hosted, SPARQL-native — that answers questions nothing else really can:

• "Is this photo folder already backed up, or only on this SD card?"
• "Which orchestra score is the canonical version, and who has access to it?"
• "What was I working on last Tuesday when I was at the music school?"

It's not a backup tool, and it's not a file manager. It's closer to institutional memory for one person's digital life — built from a federated RDF knowledge graph, a pluggable file indexer, and an AI assistant that queries your own local data privately.

It has academic roots: I co-authored papers on distributed personal file management at Technische Universität Dresden in 2013–2014, and the file indexer has been quietly running in production on my own infrastructure since late 2014. It just never got out into the world.

Until now.

Why sponsorship matters

It doesn't have to be a lot to matter. A small recurring amount buys back the thinking time that turns working infrastructure into something other people can actually install, use, and build on. And it tells me the problem is real to someone besides me — which, after years of mostly building alone, is its own kind of fuel.

What your support enables

• 📦 A clean NixOS installation experience so anyone can run this
• 📖 Documentation and a public ontology at semanticdesk.top
• 🔌 Plugin adapters for Thunderbird, Nextcloud, and Android
• 🎙️ Voice assistant integration for KDE Plasma
• 📝 A proper NLnet / Prototype Fund grant application

If you have ever lost a file across clouds, wondered whether a backup actually ran, or wished your computer understood your work the way you do — this is for you.