Akonadi/Nepomuk integration with Telepathy

George Kiagiadakis kiagiadakis.george at gmail.com
Sat Oct 3 16:44:16 CEST 2009


Hi,
I spent some time yesterday trying to understand how nepomuk and
akonadi work and I think I'm ready to jump into this discussion as
well.

2009/9/15 Thomas McGuire <mcguire at kde.org>:
> Hi,
>
> On Monday 14 September 2009 23:46:26 you wrote:
>> First of all, sorry for the cross-posting. I'm not quite sure of the
>> best way to address Akonadi and Nepomuk developers together.
>>
>> I've been involved with Telepathy for about a year and a half, and for
>> most of that time, on and off, I've been considering the question of
>> if/how/why/when/etc Telepathy should interact with Akonadi and
>> Nepomuk. Every time I have a discussion about it, I leave thinking I
>> know the answer, but always before I complete any implementation I
>> find myself doubting whether I am doing the right thing. I'd like to
>> try and solve this once and for all, so here goes.

[...]

> Tobias suggested writing an Akonadi resource that can read the Telepathy
> contacts, which is a great idea to get KDEPIM applications see the Telepathy
> contacts. Akonadi would also feed those contacts to Nepomuk, so they would be
> available for semantic searches as well.
> However, Akonadi has no concept of 'real persons' or meta-contacts, unlike
> PIMO. So everything is a bid murky here.

If we make an akonadi resource that reads the telepathy contacts and
akonadi feeds these contacts into nepomuk and then we have some
"virtual contact list" that combines all the known contacts from
akonadi with metadata (relationships) from nepomuk, I think we have
the ultimate contact list :D However, there would be some problems
with that:
1) The whole purpose of this (or at least, the part that concerns me)
is to have metacontacts in kopete/kcall. However, if we show this list
in kopete/kcall, it is not certain that one could contact a person
from there, because some protocols require you to put the other person
in the server-side contact list before being able to contact him, and
then he needs to authorize you, etc... So, what will happen with
contacts from your imap server for example? One solution would be to
use only the contacts from the telepathy resource, but on the other
hand, there are protocols which allow you to call anybody, like SIP,
and we definitely want all contacts from akonadi that have a phone
number associated with them to be in the list for calling them on SIP.
2) We need an application that will be able to edit the contact
relationships in nepomuk. KAddressbook sounds like a good candidate to
me, but I'm not sure...
3) We need to combine these with presence information. Is an akonadi
contact resource capable of reading presence information as well? If
not, then probably the whole idea is wrong. Or maybe we can make
kaddressbook/kopete/kcall read presence information directly from the
telepathy account manager where it is needed, but then combining
information from 3 different sources in 3 or more different places is
getting complex...
4) Will kopete/kcall require akonadi and nepomuk in order to work?
This doesn't sound good, given that kcall already has a dependency
hell... And what if someone wants to disable nepomuk and/or akonadi?

Consider this as a brain dump too. I'm not even sure I have understood
nepomuk and akonadi correctly, but I hope I can help to find a
solution.

Regards,
George


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