Bruce Byfield has up an interview with Aaron Seigo on the Future of KDE.
Good Stuff
I like to hear about some of the new stuff for KDE: Desktop changes according to geo-location? Very neat! OpenChange, the “Samba for Exchange”? Much needed!
That’s good stuff – exciting and useful with clear potential.
Confusing Stuff
Confession time: I don’t understand what the hell Nepomuk is. Here’s the main page – front page – description:
NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.
Um, ok?
Here’s the “Project Summary“:
NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries.
NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop.
Blah blah blah. Who writes this stuff? The acronym is horrible as well. Whoever wrote this might be far more educated than I am, but probably has much more boring weekends.
So please break this down so people can understand why they should be excited about “the social desktop”. Pictures and/or video preferred.
What does NEPOMUK bring to the desktop? Is it a button? An application? A search engine? A tasty dessert topping?
A sort of a start
If I follow about 4 links I eventually end up at Discover Neopmuk As a User, which is a good start but a bit hard to find and not as compelling as it could be. (It looks a bit out of date.)
This is an example of where I would like to see more effort put into the PR end of KDE. Instead of defending 4.0, move on and break down and hype up some of these new features! They are worth talking about – and they are worth explaining to potential users.
I would wager that the vast majority of current users only have a very vague idea (if any) of Nepomuk, and that potential users have no idea whatsoever. I also wager that fully half of those who DO know about it think it is “Neopunk”, and is some sort of new desktop theme.
#1 by Jose_X on April 14, 2010 - 4:47 pm
I can't speak for the KDE team, but I think the goal is essentially to tag lots of things so that you can automate many things.
Eg, if there was a "note" tag linked to typical files, then a file browser might display those notes when you hover over the corresponding file.
Eg, if there is a "license" link, then you might be able to see all the files with licenses or even if every file (composed of multiple licensed parts) are compatible. You would achieve this if you also had a ruleset of which are all the possible license combinations that would be compatible.
If you want more examples, just consider any existing XML or meta facility that exists. [One other example is the "depends on" "requires" etc relationships in the (eg) Debian packaging architecture.]
The possibilities are endless and the goal of the project is to enable KDE this way. [Eg, the "desktop" tags and mimes (and in-file metadata) are old examples).
I think.
#2 by Jason on April 14, 2010 - 9:51 pm
Jose_X,
I have about the same level of understand that you do .. I think the concept is to tag, cross-reference, and otherwise organize and present metadata, but I have no concrete picture of how it works.
#3 by Jose_X on April 15, 2010 - 5:37 pm
Some software had been written that I think serves as an interface to a daemon (plus supporting cast). I think it allows you to enter property relationships or something (can't remember, perhaps I'll look it up a little later). You can query and you can have some other things done I think.
So besides writing the infrastructure support, they then want applications to leverage this system more by finding such relationships and by querying as necessary to utilize them.
An important part of this project would also have to be documentation and standardization.
BTW, I think most of the slant with this project, at least for now, is to target application developers. Other users would for now not participate in this (unless they wanted to contribute ideas, etc). In other words, I think their current focus is to make it transparent to most people.
Also, sorry, I did not read the "Discover Neopmuk As a User" until now (I repeated a number of things from there in above comment, probably because I may have read it before and have read other articles and commented on them). I think the references in it to "user" are probably intended at those that might help create/document relationships or perhaps code them up. Probably "user" of the DIY type (along the lines of a developer). In other articles I read and/or comments, I think they really are looking to make most of it work transparently for anyone that doesn't like to get dirty and just want things to work automatically. That explanation is for the rest of us, I think.
[I'll eventually look at it closer once I think I'll be prepared to contribute more.]
#4 by spc on April 22, 2010 - 7:43 am
Neopmuk Project summary?? well it’s “crap” in human readable
BTY I also can’t figure out what the hell is it.