[nepomuk-kde] Plasma activities and Nepomuk

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 07 August 2009, Hari krishna Anandhan wrote:
> ActivityContext: - Activity name (given by user)
> - Activity Type

the Type is a kind of categorization or even a "tag" if viewed even more 
loosely. however, the big question here (as in most of these contextual 
technology discussions) is:

	How do we present this to the user?

"user" can be one of: plasmoid developer, end user, ...

to the plasmoid developer, having names and types is just further complication 
and doesn't add one bit of extra information for them to use. both are equally 
abstract until associated with something relevant to the plasmoid. 

concrete example: instant messenger widget.

the idea of a "work type" plasmoid is pretty irrelevant unless "work type" is 
associated with "contacts associated with work". even more importantly, i may 
not want all my work contacts associated with that activity as it may be a 
specific work project that i'm representing. this makes putting my "Plasma 
Netbook" activity into the "Work Activity" category not particularly useful.

what i want to do (as a user) is to associate groups of users, files, 
locations, etc with an activity. to do that does not require any sort of 
categorization of activities. it just takes the usual "associate this stuff 
with that stuff" that semantic frameworks (e.g. nepomuk) are meant for.

one could create a "work" entry in Nepomuk and associate a bunch of stuff with 
that and we can certainly provide a way to associate nodes in the semantic 
store with an activity ... but from a user interface perspective there's no 
benefit to having actual "activity types" or just plain ol' "groups of stuff" 
in Nepomuk, and from a code perspective i'd rather keep the amount of things 
added to Nepomuk for this to be minimized as much as possible as it will only 
make working with the rest of what Nepomuk offers harder rather than easier.

which is why i never suggested categories for activities. it did cross my mind 
when first designing the in Plasma, but i quickly realized that such 
categories are:

* not useful to everyone (as such will be ignored)
* make writing plasmoids more confusing and complex
* too restrictive to be real world useful in many (most?) cases
* can be accomplished anyways by allowing users to freely associate items in 
the Nepomuk store with an activity

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software
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