thoughts from FOSDEM, status

[Scott Wheeler]

Ok, so it's been three weeks since FOSDEM, but I've been meaning to send out 
an update of sorts since then (and no, Sevtap, I really didn't forget that I 
said I'd do a follow up -- I'm just disorganized).

There were a few interesting things that came from my FOSDEM talk --

*) Mindshare is growing a bit, in a way that I'm mostly happy with.  Most 
people aren't really sure what it is that we're working on, but they know 
that it's supposed to be cool.  That's a good thing, since I think explaining 
some of the ideas is a bit tough when you can't sit people down for an hour 
and go through the details, and "it's supposed to be cool" is probably better 
than random misinformation.

*) The talk was very well attended given that it was just a "KDE development 
room" talk rather than one on the main schedule.  There were 100 chairs in 
the room and most were full with a fair number of people standing.

*) The questions phase went for over half an hour -- there were a lot of 
questions about RDF and things related to semantic webs and how this is 
similar or different.  This is part of why I'm reading up on such things at 
the moment.

*) One of the more interesting questions was from Sevtap -- and I thought it's 
something that Kévin would find interesting given his research in multi-agent 
systems.  Kévin and I talked a bit about this right after FOSDEM, but it's 
worth repeating here:

  Essentially Sevtap's question (and feel free to correct me) was along the 
  lines of, "Why not move the query logic into applications rather than a 
  central place?"  Essentially querying the applications as "agents" and 
  having them return things as such.

I'm not sure that it's a practical approach, but it's certainly an interesting 
way of looking at the problem, so it's worth thinking about.  Practically 
speaking there's the problem that the applications not running all of the 
time, but Kévin kind of jumped to the idea of applications having parallel 
"agents" that come from the application.  From my side -- independent of how 
these are organized this led to the idea that it probably makes sense to have 
plugins that can come from applications for query logic, much in the same way 
that KFileMetaInfo can abstract away retrieval logic.  This isn't immediately 
useful since we're still a fair number of steps away from that, but certainly 
an interesting way of looking at things.

Ok -- so, post FOSDEM -- while I haven't been coding on this stuff for the 
last while, I have been reading quite a bit.  Specifically:

*) Practical RDF -- from O'Reilly.  Just some of the basic structural stuff, 
naturally light on theory.  Just wanted a crash course in RDF semantics, and 
it's been somewhat helpful (though I'm not sure I would recommend it).  The 
more I learn about RDF the more I tend to believe those that told me that it 
wasn't really all that useful for KLink like structures, but "somebody else 
told me it's irrelevant" is hardly convincing when you're fielding questions 
after a talk.

*) Ontology Learning for the Semantic Web -- again, recommended by Kévin -- 
who seems to be our resident academic on these topics.  I think the point is 
mostly on building "bottom-up" ontologies rather than "top-down" ontologies.  
Or something like that.  I'm not that far into it yet as it's rather slow 
reading for someone not already involved in the field.

*) Essentials of Cognitive Psychology -- this hasn't actually arrived yet, but 
should shortly.  Since I'll be travelling a lot in the next couple of weeks 
that means lots of reading time and I'd like to pick up a bit on basically 
how people remember stuff as I think that may be useful down the line.

Right now I've printed out quite a lot of the older design related stuff and 
am spreading it out on my living room floor to see if it all still makes 
sense and what needs to be updated.  I'm hoping to update the design document 
tomorrow (as its terribly out of date) and possibly to attempt to harmonize 
some of our vocabulary with that which is in use in academia.  I'd like to 
get back to coding too.  We'll see how the time goes.

Cheers,

-Scott

-- 
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb 
as the next guy. 
--Richard Feynman