The Portland Project

KDE is playing an active role in unifying the developers' view on the Free Desktop. Portland intends to develop a common set of Linux Desktop Programming Interfaces and Tools to allow applications to easily integrate with the free desktop configuration an end user has chosen to work with. The Portland interfaces are intended to provide a set of defacto standards:

Third party software developers can rely on these interfaces for all their simple integration needs.
KDE Developers can make sure that KDE is well supported by assuring that the xdg utils function well
Distribution vendors can provide custom versions of these utilities in case they want to support "unusual" systems

Portland interfaces will be delivered in the form of a set of commandline utilities (xdg-utils) and one or more libraries (DAPI) that applications can link with.

The Portland utils contain programs that assist in

copying files between 'desktop URIs', such as those used for the KIO slaves, e.g. downloading a file from an FTP server (xdg-copy)
installing and uninstalling icons to the desktop (xdg-desktop)
sending emails using the user's preferred email composer (xdg-email)
installing and uninstalling application-launcher menu items (xdg-menu)
providing information about file type handling (xdg-mime)
running a command as a different (often root) user (xdg-su)
opening a file in the user's preferrred application (xfg-open)