[Nepomuk] Nepomuk User Documentation

David Narvaez david.narvaez at computer.org
Wed Jul 25 05:19:49 UTC 2012


Hi,

A bit more than a month ago, we set up a projects to give talks about KDE
to the members of Free Software Communities who are already using KDE for
one or another reason but are still not familiar with the very many pieces
of software around. It eventually caught the attention of non-KDE users
that are either using GNOME (a vast majority of Free Software users in
Panama use GNOME) or proprietary software like Windows and Mac.

I gave a talk about Semantic Desktop in general, spanning from how to use
Nepomuk to search to the use of Activities to keep the desktop organized.
For some reason, I'm never ever prepared for a talk on time, so I found
myself looking for info the night before. The thing is that, even when I'm
familiar with Nepomuk code from the inside, I didn't find a way to
introduce Nepomuk from a non-technical perspective as a list of "this is
what you can do with this project". So I went and searched in the two most
obvious places I thought of:

1) The Nepomuk site, which didn't have that info... or any other useful
info at all
2) The Userbase, which didn't have all the info together

At that point I thought that looking for a place where Nepomuk features
were showcased in a single compiled resource was too much to ask, but I
found

https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/

which was exactly what I needed for my talk. I very much did my whole talk
from that information, and I can't help but wonder: Why on earth is that
compiled set of information not in the Userbase - at the very least - or
better yet in KDE Nepomuk's website as a primary huge link? I challenge 10
skilled web crawlers to find that blog before one user unrelated to KDE
finds a place where Nepomuk is being hated.

Hiding this information from users is the precise way to keep Nepomuk out
of their hands and fuels the already big amount of fire being thrown to the
project since the very begining. I think KDE Nepomuk is a killer feature in
KDE but the lack of user-oriented documentation is undermining its
potential, and this should be fixed.

There are some obvious courses of action: I don't know if the author of
that blog is in this list, but in any case, we should definitely work with
her on putting all of that information at KDE Nepomuk's site, very visible
and updated. After that, maintenance of the documentation could also be set
up as documentation sprints with screenshots etc for every KDE SC release
that includes new KDE Nepomuk features, etc.

David E. Narvaez
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