syncing nepomuk metadata between hosts?

[Kristian Rink]

Hey;

wow, that's quite a lenghty statement. :) I'll just jump in here and there..:


Am Freitag, 8. Februar 2013, 06:28:58 schrieb Duncan:

> So when I say "disabled", it's gentoo-level disabled, as in, choice made
> pre-build, support not compiled in at all.
> 
> And while I disabled semantic-desktop and etc with kde 4.7 and its
> performance is said to have improved some since then, and even tho I had
> it mostly run-time disabled before that, I was **VERY** shocked at how
> much better kde performance was, once I actually turned semantic-desktop
> support off, rebuilt kde without it, and uninstalled all the now
> unnecessary components (including nepomuk, soprano, akonadi, the mysql
> and virtuoso database backends, rasqual, redland... strigi installation
> is still required for the headers, but I don't have any backends for it
> to use so it's hard-disabled).

Well yes, that would be an option. Point being, however: I wouldn't _want_ to 
have it disabled. ;) I actually like the idea of that semantic search 
environment, I like the idea of being able to managing resource metadata all 
across different applications and different data types in a consistent, 
straightforward way. My typical example is having a "project context" which 
needs to include e-mails, images, eventually bookmarks/URLs, written 
documents, scheduled appointments, a whole load of different things. So far, in 
most of todays applications, I am almost completely unable to get these things 
together. Mail's on the IMAP server and available to the mail client only. 
Bookmarks are somewhere in a browser. Files of all kind are in folders 
available to, well, file management tools. Adding an information just like 
"this item belongs to project XYZ" _and_ having a clean way of actually finding 
all these again, so far, does not exist. Sure, I could go file level, build a 
project folder and store all the mails, the web bookmarks, the files there, but 
from some points of view this thoroughly sucks: If it works at all - 
appointments, in example, can't be managed this way - or what if items belong 
to different projects? At times, I feel thoroughly annoyed that, even though in 
2013 we do have wobbly 3D accelerated screens, we're not even able to link an 
e-mail, a PDF document and a calendar date together and actually retrieve this 
information across application boundaries. So from that point of view, count 
me as a dedicated friend of the semantic desktop idea. ;)

However:

> Meanwhile, I think the real market for the whole semantic-desktop thing
> are the sort of people that have a desktop full of icons, because that's
> the only place they ever save anything, and if by some chance they save
> it elsewhere, they never can find it.  The whole tagging thing.  The
> whole timeline thing.  It's for people that don't "think like a computer"
> and aren't interested in LEARNING to "think like a computer".  If they
> spend another 3-5 minutes doing a task because of the drag of the
> semantic desktop stuff, no big deal, because if it weren't for that,
> they'd have spent 10-15 minutes fighting the computer, trying to get it
> to do what they want, but not knowing how to communicate what they wanted
> to do, because they simply don't think the way a computer does.

I thoroughly disagree. To me, even the point of "thinking like a computer" is 
off. End users should have tools at hand allowing to get work done as 
effectively as somehow possible. Nothing more and nothing less. Take tagging or 
timelines: Sorting with vast loads of digital camera images is an annoying 
pain as soon as you are limited to just having at hand all the "features" file 
systems offer (which basically is a hierarchical store with a path and a name). 
You don't have much ways to sort this, as you either are forced into a 
hierarchy which is not too flexible, or you end up with keeping duplicates of 
your data, or you end up with doing symlinks (which no tool so far does in a 
pleasant way). How to keep images sorted in a way so to quickly find all the 
images that have (a) been taken on or around a certain day, (b) feature one or 
two certain persons and (c) are known to be taken in some special place? 
Answering questions like this sucks when all you have is a file system. That 
aside, talking "think like a computer": All the semantics stuff _is_ thinking 
like a computer, too. There's RDF. There's triple stores such as Virtuoso. 
There's SPARQL for querying such information. There's, talking images and PDFs 
and virtually all media files, a whole load of embedded meta information that 
can automatically be extracted, sorted, indexed, managed, provided to the end 
user in order to help him work more efficiently. And what do most of todays 
tools do? They still force users into defining a short file name and storing the 
file somewhere in an on-disk file system. There's so much more possible even 
while "thinking like a computer", but unfortunately, there seems quite a 
problem making people accept these solutions. And, off-hand, maybe the obstacle 
here is not attracting new users new to computers but actually convincing 
those familiar with what computers used to be like, before, that this is 
actually a good thing. ;)

Just my €0.02 of course...
Cheers,
Kristian

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