Use of library names (Akonadi, Solid, Nepomuk, Phonon etc.) in user interfaces

Daniel Winter dw at danielwinter.de
Sat Jun 7 15:01:13 BST 2008


On Saturday 07 June 2008 03:59:00 Robert Knight wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Names for some "behind the scenes" KDE libraries/daemons are creeping
> into user interfaces.

Ok, here you bring something up, I thought about a bit the last days.

I introduced the string "Nepomuk Collection"  into Amarok. I am not really 
happy with that.  I mean how should an average user understand what a "Nepomuk 
Collection" could be?

For better understanding:

It is shown next to the "Local Collection" which internaly is called 
"SqlCollection" as it stores and reades the metadata of the music in a sql-
database.  But it is not exposed to the UI as SQL is a very technicaly term.

But I am not sure if the same applies for Nepomuk.  Calling it (Social) 
"Sementic Desktop Collection" would be even worse. Nepomuk is the name for 
that technology in general and for the KDE implementation. It is more a 
"marketing term" than a technical name. So i think it may be good to expose 
it. 

A really technical explanation would be: "Collection which stores data in a 
system wide central rdf storage using Nepomuk Ontologies" ;-)

And you can think of a lot others technical names which have gone mainstream 
(i.e. DVD, CD, MP3-Player). There are even cases where a brand name has become 
the name for that thing in general. For example Excel-Table.  The generic term 
in german whould be "Tabellenkalkulations-Tabelle" (spreadsheet table?) but 
even as I  havn't used Excel for years now I often call it "Excel Tabelle". It 
is easier to understand for most of the people outthere. 

I mean with the same reasing you could go and call Konqueror "KDE Webbrowser" 
everywhere.  But Konqueror is a strong KDE brand. As it is plasma starting to 
become. And you can even find threads in user community forums where they are 
talking about the possibility of introducing Nepomuk into musicplayers. 

So I am not sure about it. I mean why got Akonadi that really beautifull logo 
after all if its name should just be an internal name for KDE developers? 

The only other name for "Nepomuk Collection" i can come up with is "Central 
system wide Collection" .  But that doesn't make clear that its data will be 
avaible where ever Nepmuk is used. (in the upcomming nepomuksearch kio slave, 
in Dolphin, in other Nepomuk using applications). 

DanielW




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