[dot] KDE Storms First Day of FOSDEM 2007

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1172420257/

From: Jos Boortvliet <>
Dept: hot-fos
Date: Sunday 25/Feb/2007, @08:17

KDE Storms First Day of FOSDEM 2007
===================================

   The first day of the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European
Meeting in Brusssels was very busy for the KDE team: attending talks by
other talented hackers, hosting KDE related talks in the developer room,
representing KDE at the booth, mingling with other hackers, bug hunting
and work on new features. KDE had a strong presence this year, at least
twice as many KDE people attended including a very strong showing from
the Amarok developers. Speakers in the KDE developer room included Jos
van den Oever, Stephan Laurient, Flavio and Sander Koning.
    The Nepomuk Talk
     Our FOSDEM presence in Brussels started with the traditional
'Friday Beer Event' at Le Roy d'Espagne in the Grand Place. The KDE
stall on Saturday was very crowded with both curious visitors and long
time KDE people. The staff sold almost 500 euro worth of merchandise!
Unfortunately we won't be able to match that total on Sunday, we are
simply out of T-shirts, badges, bags and mugs. Many people moved to the
developer room for the Nepomuk talk, and made themselves comfortable
behind their laptops.



                    NEPOMUK AND THE SEMANTIC DESKTOP

     The first talk was about the Nepomuk project and its integration
into KDE. Jos van den Oever of Strigi fame and Stephan Laurient from
Mandriva gave the talk, unfortunately Sebastian Trueg was ill. Jos
kicked the talk off by explaining to an intrigued audience the concepts
behind Nepomuk. Nepomuk is doing researching into the Semantic Desktop.
They are trying to enable knowledge to be processed by the computer,
allowing applications to extract more information from files and letting
the user add labels and tags to his data. The second step is sharing
this knowledge with other users and desktops. Jos showed the structure
of the framework and how it works. Nepomuk provides a set of
standardised programmer interfaces, ontologies and applications. They
aim to integrate their technology in KDE, as the tight integration
between the applications makes it easier for the developers to leverage
the many capabilities Nepomuk will offer. Then Stephane took over and
explained the project's grand vision and the people behind it. Nepomuk
gathers researchers, industrial software developers and users together
to develop a collaboration environment which supports both personal
information management and the sharing across social or organisational
relationships. He showed off some screenshots of the current status of
tagging support in Nepomuk and the integration in KDE, and what to
expect the next two years.



                                 STRIGI

     Flavio Castelli told us about using and integrating search engine
Strigi in the desktop. He explained how we are having more and more
trouble finding our files and documents, and Strigi offers a solution
here. Applications can easily ask Strigi through the DBus interface for
information like files containing a certain string or of a certain type.
Flavio showed us how to use Strigi in applications, what interfaces to
use and gave examples how to improve an application by using Strigi's
features.  They hope to work on integrating Strigi into core KDE
components such as the file dialogue in the near future.



                      DOCUMENTATION AND HANDBOOKS

     Sander Koning gave the last talk of the day. He told us about all
the coordination work going on behind the scenes for the handbooks and
documentation in KDE. Sander explained the process and tools used for
producing documentation, translating it, and getting it on the end
user's desktop. He then turned to the future and explained what they are
planning to do. More documentation of course, which means more people
working on it. Offering the documentation via a wiki might help in this
area. Documentation also needs screenshots in all of the different
languages. Sander has been working on this problem, and has developed a
tool which automatically takes screenshots of applications after a
documentation update. Sander then discussed some of the new ideas for
the context ("What's this") help, for KDE 4, and the implications for
the documentation writers. People in the room wondered if it would be
possible to link to a future documentation wiki from within the
documentation itself.
   Discussing Amarok 2.0
     During all these talks, some busy bees were hacking on different
KDE related projects. Niels van Mourik noticed that Kpat's demo mode is
very cool and really shows off Qt 4's new graphics support. The only
problem being that once the demo is over you have to start it again by
hand. So Max Kossick (one of the Amarok hackers) jumped in and fixed
Kpat to play the demo continously in the KDE booth

     All in all, the day was fruitfull and fun. At the end of the day,
the hackers flead out all over Brusselles, looking for food or returning
to their hotels. And of course preparing for tomorow!