Social Desktop in 4.3?

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday 28 April 2009 17:49:48 Richard Dale wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> > As some of you know, I've spent some intense cycles on the social desktop
> > support in KDE and specifically in Plasma. This functionality integrates
> > a social network, in this case openDesktop.org which powers sites such as
> > kde- ook.org, kde-apps.org and opendesktop.org. The server-side parts are
> > specified in the Open Collaboration Services API, to be seen on
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-service
> >s
> >
> > The grand vision behind all that is to closely integrate the social web
> > into the desktop. What's there right now is the tip of the iceberg.
>
> What I don't understand about this stuff is why it completely ignores
> the Sematic Web. Why doesn't it use FOAF for instance, instead of
> redoing the same thing in XML? Why do we have one set of ontologies in
> Nepomuk, and yet a completely different non-RDF bunch of stuff on the
> web?

I think that's mainly because it's all still very young technology, but I also 
have to admit that I don't know enough of the semantic stuff yet to make real 
sense of it.

Also, the KDE side of these things is not quite there yet. When I was for 
example looking for a generic concept of a Person (for this, but also for 
another project), my impression was that Nepomuk is not quite there yet.

That's of course the desktop side of things. How this looks on the web, I 
don't know. Heck, I don't even know FOAF (OK, *now* I know, thanks to 
Wikipedia ... ;-)).

All this is very new, and we're in no way setting things in stone. But I guess 
it'll take some time until it all fleshes out, becomes clear how this should 
all be connected, and for the technologies and environment to mature enough so 
it's actually useful. It's also one of the reasons why I want to get it out 
there, so visibility increases and more people start working on it. Especially 
I hope more smarter people than me do. :-)

I'm dying to combine all those subjects, but I don't see how to do it at this 
point in time, pointers are of course welcome.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9