Nepomuk has been around for quite a while but the functionality exposed in KDE 4.3 is still not that impressive. This does not mean that there does not exist cool stuff. It only means that there is not enough developer power to get it all stable and integrated perfectly. Let me give you an overview of what already exists in playground and how it can be used (and how you should use it).
The Basics
For starters there is the Nepomuk API in kdelibs which you should get familiar with.Most importantly (we will use it quite a lot later on) there is Nepomuk::Resource which gives access to arbitrary resources in Nepomuk.
Nepomuk::Resource file( myFilePath );
file.addTag( Nepomuk::Tag( “Fancy stuff” ) );
QString desc = file.description();
QList<Nepomuk::Tag> allTags = Nepomuk::Tag::allTags();
Resource allows simple manipulation of data in Nepomuk. Using some fancy cmake magic through the new NepomukAddOntologyClasses macro in kdelibs data manipulation gets even simpler. The second basic thing you should get familliar with is Soprano and SPARQL. As a quickstart the following code shows how I typically create queries using Soprano:
using namespace Soprano;
Model* model = Nepomuk::ResourceManager::instance()->mainModel();
QString query = QString( “prefix nao:%1 “
“select ?x where { “
“%2 nao:hasTag ?t . “
“?r nao:hasTag ?t . }” )
.arg(Node::resourceToN3(Vocabulary::NAO::naoNamespace()))
.arg(Node::resourceToN3(file.resourceUri()));
QueryResultIterator it
= model->executeQuery( query, Query::QueryLanguageSparql );
As you can see there is always a lot of QString::arg involved to prevent hard-coding of URIs (again Soprano provides some cmake magic for generating Vocabulary namespaces).
These are the basics. Without these basics you cannot use Nepomuk.
Debugging Nepomuk Data
Now before we dive into the unstable, experimental, and really cool stuff let me mention sopranocmd.
sopranocmd is a command line tool that comes with Soprano and allows to perform virtually any operation possible on the Nepomuk RDF database. It has an exhaustive help output and you should use it to debug your data, test your queries and the like (if anyone is interested in creating a graphical version, please step up).
The Nepomuk database (hosting only a single Soprano model called “main”) can be accessed though D-Bus as follows:
sopranocmd --dbus org.kde.NepomukStorage --model main \
query "select ?r where { ?r ?p ?o . }"
The Good Stuff
There is quite a lot of experimental stuff in the playground but I want to focus on the annotation framework and Scribo.
The central idea of the annotation framework is the annotation suggestion which is encapsulated in the Annotation class (Hint: run “make apidox” in the annotationplugin folder). Instead of the user manually annotating resources (adding tags or relating things to other things) the system proposes annotations which the user then simply acknowledges or discards. These Annotation instances are normally created by AnnotationPlugin instances (although it is perfectly possible to create them some other way) which are trigged through an AnnotationRequest.
Before I continue a short piece of code for the impatient:
Resource res = getResource();
AnnotationPluginWrapper* wrapper = new AnnotationPluginWrapper();
wrapper.setPlugins( AnnotationPluginFactory::instance()
->getPluginsSupportingAnnotationForResource( res.resourceUri() ) );
connect( wrapper, SIGNAL(newAnnotation(Nepomuk::Annotation*)),
this, SLOT(addNewAnnotation(Nepomuk::Annotation*)) );
connect( wrapper, SIGNAL(finished()),
this, SLOT(slotFinished()) );
AnnotationRequest req;
req.setResource( res );
req.setFilter( filter );
wrapper->getPossibleAnnotations( req );
The AnnotationPluginWrapper is just a convenience class which prevents us from connecting to each plugin separately. It reproduces the same signals the plugins emit.
The interesting part is the AnnotationRequest. At the moment (the framework is under development. This also means that your ideas, patches, and even refactoring actions are very welcome) it has three parameters, all of which are optional:
- A resource – The resource for which the annotation should be created. This parameter is a bit tricky as the Annotation::create method allows to create an annotation on an arbitrary resource but in some cases it makes perfect sense to only create annotation suggestions for only one resource.
- A filter string – A filter is supposed to be a short string entered by the user which triggers an auto-completion via annotations. Plugins should also take the resource into account if it is set.
- A text – An arbitrary long text which is to be analyzed by plugins. Plugins would typically extract keywords or concepts from it. Plugins should also take resource and filter into account if possible. This is where the Scribo system comes in (more later).
Plugins that I already created include very simple ones like the tag plugin which matches the filter to existing tag names and also excludes tags already set on the resource. Way more interesting are other plugins like the pimotype plugin which matches the filter to pimo types and proposed to use that type or the pimo relation plugin which allows to create relations via a very simple syntax: “author:trueg“. The latter will match author to existing properties and trueg to a value based on the property range. One step further goes the geonames annotation plugin which matches the filter or the resource label to cities or countries using the geonames web service. It will then propose to set a location or (in case the resource label was matched) to convert the resource into a city or country linking to the geonames resource.
A picture says more than a thousand words. Thus, here goes:
What do we see here? The user entered the text Paris in the AnnotationWidget (a class available in the framework) and the framework then created a set of suggested annotations. The most likely one is Paris, the city in France as sugested by the geonames plugin. The latter also proposes a few not so likely places. The pimotype plugin proposes to create a new type named Paris and the tag plugin proposes to create a new tag named Paris. Here I see room for improvement: if we can relate to the city Paris there is no need for the tag. Thus, some more sophisticated rating and comparision may be in order.
Now let us bring Scribo into play. Scribo is another framework in the playground which provides an API for text analysis and keyword extraction. It is tied into the annotation framework through a dedicated plugin which uses the TextAnnotation class to create annotations on specific text positions. The TextAnnotation class is supposed to be used to annotate text documents. It will create a new nfo:TextDocument and make it a nie:isPartOf the main document. Then the new resource is annotated according to the implementation.
The Scribo framework will extract keywords and entities from the text (specified via the AnnotationRequest text field) via plugins which will then be used to create annotation suggestions. There currently exist three plugins for Scribo: the datetime plugin extracts dates and times, the pimo plugin matches words in the text to things in the Nepomuk database, and the OpenCalais plugin will use the OpenCalais webservice to extract entities from the text.
You can try the Scribo framework by using the scriboshell which can be found in the playground, too:
Paste the text to analyze in the left view and press the “Start” button. The right panel will then show all found entities and keywords including the text position and relevance.
The other possibility is to directly use the resourceeditor which is part of the annotation framework and bundles all gui elements the latter has to offer in one widget. Call it on a text file and you will get a window similar to the following:
At the top you have the typical things: editable label and description, the rating, and the tags. Below that you have the exisiting properties and annotations. In the picture these are only properties extracted by Strigi. Then comes the interesting part: the suggestions. Here you can see three different Scribo plugins in action. First the pimo plugin matched the word “Brein” to an event I already had in my Nepomuk database. Then there is the OpenCalais plugin which extracted the “Commission of European Communities” (so far the plugin ignores the additional semantic information provided by OpenCalais) and proposes to tag the text with it.
The last suggested annotation that we can see is “Create Event“. This is a very interesting hack I did. The Scribo plugin detected the mentioning of a project, a date, and persons and thus, proposes to create an event which has as its topic the project and takes place at the extracted time. Since it is a hack created specifically for a demo its results will not be very great in many situations. But it shows the direction which I would like to take.
Below the suggestions you can see the AnnotationWidget again which allows to manually annotate the file.
How to Write an AnnotationPlugin
This is a Howto in three sentences: Derive from AnnotationPlugin and implement doGetPossibleAnnotations. In that method trigger the creation of annotations. Your annotations can be instances of SimpleAnnotation or be based on Annotation and implement at least doCreate, exists, and equals .
class MyAnnotationPlugin : pubic Nepomuk::AnnotationPlugin
{
public:
MyAnnotationPlugin(QObject* parent, const QVariantList&);
protected:
void doGetPossibleAnnotations(const Nepomuk::AnnotationRequest&);
};
void MyAnnotationPlugin::doGetPossibleAnnotations(
const Nepomuk::AnnotationRequest& request
)
{
// MyFancyAnnotation can do all sorts of crazy things like creating
// whole graphs of data or even openeing another GUI
addNewAnnotation(new MyFancyAnnotation(request));
// SimpleAnnotation can be used to create simple key/value pairs
Nepomuk::Types::Property property(Soprano::Vocabulary::NAO::prefLabel());
Nepomuk::SimpleAnnotation* anno = new Nepomuk::SimpleAnnotation();
anno->setProperty(property);
anno->setValue("Hello World");
// currently only the comment is used in the existing GUIs
anno->setComment("Set label to 'Hello World'");
addNewAnnotation(anno);
// tell the framework that we are done. All this could also
// be async
emitFinsihed();
}
And Now?
At the Nepomuk workshop Tom Albers already experimented with integrating the annotation suggestions into Mailody. It is rather simple to do that but the framework still needs polishing. More importantly, however, the created data needs to be presented to the user in a more appealing way. In short: I need help with all this!
Integrate it into your applications, improve it, come up with new ways of presenting the information, write new plugins. Jump on board of the semantic desktop train.
Thanks for reading.
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