The Semantic Desktop – KDE Style

Speaker: Sebastian Trüg

The semantic desktop has become a reality on KDE, but it's power is mostly hidden to the eye. This presentation plans to unravel the full power of nepomuk on KDE 4. We presented the idea behind the semantic desktop at last year's Akademy. Since then a lot of the implementation has changed, but the idea remained the same, maybe better defined, and more possibilities emerged as we progressed. So far we have the core services running on KDE 4, the most important of them – the RDF repository which stores user's personal information in a standardized/unified way. We have some functionality implemented already, like rating and tagging of files in dolphin and some smart search functionality that takes advantage of all the information stored in the rdf repository. The next steps are concerned mainly with using the power that the system gives us in applications. We must use the applications to create information and store it in the RDF store so that other interested applications can find it and use it. For this the applications should speak the same language. This will eventually lead to a great amount of data being stored. This data is already categorized, and some links are created between resources, but more links can be inferenced or, with appropriate application support, created by the user. We will show Semn – a semantic note-taking tool that automatically creates links from notes to the mentioned resources. As a way of exploring and using the semantic information we show Konduit – a visual programming application that allows the user to create reusable work flows that combine the semantic information on the desktop with information from other sources like files or online repositories.