Social Desktop in 4.3?

[Richard Dale]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.
Yes, the RESTful apis actually look very nice and easy to use. It's
just that I think
data should be the starting point, and not a specific api. Otherwise,
we'll just end
with another 'data silo' even if it has a public open api, because to
do anything with
the data well will need to convert it to other formats.


> 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.
Nepomuk uses different ontologies optimized for the semantic desktop. But
if the data is in the form of triples it is much easier to transform
it and combine
it with other RDF based data. For KDE the semantic web ontologies that seem
be the most suitable might be:

* FOAF - info about people
* SIOC - blogging info
* SCOT - tags that are connected to semantic web ontologies, rather then just
being names
* DOAP - description of a project

> 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.
I think the name to search for is 'Social Semantic Desktop'. Here is a
slide show by
John Breslin (it mentions KDE4):

http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/the-social-semantic-web-presentation?type=powerpoint

I'll cc this to the Nepomuk list as the people there know the most
about it, and I would be
interested to hear what they have to say about the Social Desktop stuff.
-- Richard