MIT Technology Review explores NEPOMUK, the Social Semantic Desktop in KDE

KDE 4 saw the introduction of NEPOMUK, the foundations for the "Social Semantic Desktop". The idea behind Semantic desktops is to make it possible for computers to identify meaningful relations between files and real-world
people and relationships. These relations can then be exploited to help the
user find their data. Read the full MIT Technology Review article on the project to learn why it "might be the semantic desktop that
actually survives" and see how its inclusion in KDE is making it accessible to
end users during its development process, and read on for a brief overview of how NEPOMUK works.

NEPOMUK offers a combination of automatically created metadata (such as document modification dates and music file tags) with user-created comments and more complex relationships such as that between an email attachment and the sender and recipients of an email. Files can then be found by using a search combining several items of metadata rather than relying only on keywords. NEPOMUK aims to go a step further than other similar projects by making it easy for members of a community to share their accumulated metadata and to transfer files with the collected metadata intact.

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Comments

by Chad (not verified)

KRunner, Plasma, and the File Open dialog are all good places for it, but where I'd really like the ability is in Dolphin with it automatically searching only in the folders below the one I'm presently in. The filter bar in Dolphin now is very limited.

Chad

by Janne (not verified)

Besides putting it in file-dialog, how about putting it in dolphin (well, everywhere to be honest)? I would love to see smart-folders in KDE, where you could define a set of criteria (for example: all text-documents modified in the last 30 days) and that folder would then display all files that match that criteria.

Oh, and I think the kio-slave should be renamed. "nepomuksearch" is a bit on a long side for quick searches :)

by ghhhu (not verified)

From the article : "funding of the nepomuk project stops this month" , so i really hope that we got the manpower and interest in this project to keep it moving forward fast !!!!!

other attempts already nearly died to get semantic desktop to work (strigi...)

by sebas (not verified)

Strigi didn't die but is alive and kicking. It's used in KDE4's desktop indexer, for example.

As to continuation of NEPOMUK, there will be an announcement regarding this in January.

by LB (not verified)

Is Strigi "alive and kicking" in KDE Trunk or should it work with current stable version 4.1.3? For me in version 4.1.3 Strigi is kicking, but isn't alive.

I really hope for a good desktop search solution in KDE 4.2. Are you aware of any changes in KDE to go from hope to reality?

Also do you know anything about "Strigi Reloaded"?

Thanks!

by sebas (not verified)

I've not tested it with 4.1, but with 4.2 it works for me. That's the integrated "Strigi Reloaded" solution, AFAIK. It uses strigi's JStream library.

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

Is there a way to diagnose what is Nepomuk/Strigi doing? On my system I have always to turn both off or I get 100% CPU usage: I thought it was due to the index being built, but when it still stays at 100% after 5 hours, I'm not too sure.