[Kde-pim] Kde-pim identities

Tue Jul 29 22:33:17 BST 2008

On Sunday 27 July 2008, Pier-Olivier Thibault wrote:
> Sorry I'll make things clearer by restating more thoughtfully what my
> main idea is.

I think your main idea is a very good idea. I just think that you are 
looking at the wrong tool. You should look at Nepomuk instead of at 
Akonadi.

> 1. PIM has evolved so much that now it is not really a separate
> application that manage our PIM but everything you do on a computer
> is based on personal Information: E-mails, IM, IRC, Calendar, wikis,
> even Browsing the Web on most website needs authentification.

I wouldn't say "everything", but I agree that a lot of what one does on 
a computer is about personal information.

> 2. While the Oses become more and more transparent with PIM data, it
> is clear that we need some sort of resource or management that could
> make all the information available in a very clean and reliable way.

Agreed.

> 3. Akonadi has proven itself to serve reliably as a storage for PIM
> data. Serving for e-mails, vcard resource, etc.

You are still confusing Akonadi with storage. Akonadi serves as 
interface to your PIM data. It does not store any data. It _can_ cache 
data, e.g. to allow offline access to your data. Your PIM data will be 
stored in local files or on your provider's mail server or whereever. 
The beauty of Akonadi is that applications using Akonadi to access PIM 
data do not have to know where your data is stored.

Please have a look at http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/. Akonadi is the yellow 
circle, i.e. it is the protocol/interface between the storage in the 
center and the (PIM) applications.

> 4. Most of the thing we do while on a computer are using "user" or
> "identity" I know that in some cases (like Kmail) you may need 2 or 3
> different "signature" or "contact information" so that you can use
> the right one depending on who you are communicating with. While
> those are not really identity but contact info (Much like you have a
> phone number at home and one at work. Even though the number are
> different, the person you are reaching is the same) Most of the time,
> you are using the same basic information like your name, your
> birthday, your address, your phone number, etc.

There are also role-based identities. They are not contact info of a 
single person, but of a group of people performing this role. 
sysadmin at kde.org is such a role-based identity. Another one that is 
actually one of my identities is kdepim-users-owner at kde.org. Moreover, 
I am using an identity for KDE-related mailing list messages and 
another one for KDE-related private messages. I have those two 
KDE-related identities for pure convenience. I'm just mentioning this 
to make clear that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence 
between KDE PIM identities and a contact info-like identity. Moreover, 
I am using the same bookmarks and desktop background with all of my 
identities although I can see that it might make sense to have a 
general distinction between work-related contact info + bookmarks + 
application settings + ... and private contact info + bookmarks + 
application settings + .... But IMO this is beyond the scope of 
identities resp. is orthogonal to identities.

> 5. Instead of storing and accessing them through different means (
> KMail, KaddressBook for some info, IdentityManager for some other,
> even KWallet in some areas...) I think it would be easy for any
> program that needs the information to get what's necessary for it to
> run properly.

Sure. But all applications need only a small subset of this information. 
KMail only needs your email address, your name and maybe the name of 
the company/organization you work for. KMail doesn't need to know your 
home or work address. Moreover, different applications have very 
different needs when it comes to "identities" because each application 
has a different interpretation of what identity means. Among others I 
have the following high-level identities:
- A private identity for communication with family and friends.
- A work identity.
- A KDE identity.
- ...

Now if you look closer, then my high-level KDE identity does in fact map 
to the following KDE PIM identities:
- KDE PIM identity for mailing list messages
- KDE PIM identity for private messages
- KDE PIM identity for kdepim-users administration tasks
- ...

Those low-level KDE PIM identities are completely irrelevant for most 
other applications.

Next let's look at my address and my telephone numbers (what you called 
contact info). Obviously, my high-level work identity maps to the 
contact info for my work-place. OTOH, my private contact info is the 
same for my private high-level identity and for my KDE identity.

To summarize:
It is not possible to find a general definition of identity which covers 
everything. Each "identity" is made up of different parts of 
information and the KDE PIM identities as used in KMail, KNode and 
Mailody are just one of those different parts.

BTW, all those different parts or aspects of identities together with 
the relations between those different parts form a semantic graph (or 
web). As such Nepomuk is exactly what you need to store this.

> 6. Managing your PIM in only one place for all your personnal setting
> would also make things more consistent( A bit like IdentityManager
> that is used in Control Center and Kmail ).

As I tried to outline above it is not possible to have a central place 
for managing all identity related settings because this place would be 
very confusing. You'd have to show those settings as a directed graph 
(as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(mathematics) ) similar to a 
mind map, but with cycles.

> 7. Obviously these information are only accessible to the user.
> Another user can't gain access of such information( Database on
> Akonadi resides in ~/ so other user doesn't have access... privacy
> should not be a problem here)

Nepomuk's database is also private.

> 8. Maybe Akonadi is not the solution for this matter. Maybe some
> other framework would be more appropriate or maybe a brand new
> library would be more suited for that. My opinion was that Akonadi
> was the right answer, but apparently, I could be wrong.

I think Nepomuk is the better answer. Akonadi might make use of the 
information stored by Nepomuk, but the actual information should be 
stored by and accessed through Nepomuk.

> 9. This way, Information could be shared easily with applets,
> plasmoids, and what not. I think this would be great for PIM.

True. Note that Nepomuk is not restricted to PIM. In fact, Nepomuk is 
mostly agnostic of PIM.

> Finally, I honestly don't see any security problem as once you're
> loggin on your user, you usually want to _use_ your personal
> information... All of this would always be only accessible to user
> and I think that is quite the opposite of Nepomuk which tries to take
> your information to share it with others.

That's not what Nepomuk does. Did you have a look at 
http://nepomuk.kde.org/?

Regards,
Ingo
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