The Fascinator Desktop
The Fascinator Desktop is an open source (GPL version 2), cross-platform system aimed at providing researchers with a cohesive toolset for:
Collating digital objects from a variety of sources
Making these digital objects searchable
Providing tools that assist in:
the synthesis of information
collaboration
publishing of research outcomes and dissemination of research data
The Desktop Fascinator is based on The Fascinator, which has been inspired by the ongoing problem of getting eResearch data and publications into repositories where they can be backed up, preserved and shared with a network of other researchers. See Desktop eResearch revolution which gives some of the background.
Another source of inspiration has been consumer tools like Picasa, which indexes images and provides a way to browse them, iTunes which indexes music files and provides faceted search and browsing based on metadata such as artist and album, and KDE/Linux application digiKam which has an easy to configure tagging system for classifying images.