GSoC Wrap-up Part 2

Last time I presented the work Adam Kidder did on Nepomuk virtual folders in the GSoC. Today the story continues with the work by Alessandro Sivieri, my second GSoC student.

Whenever we handle files on the computer we need to bother with folder structures and file names. We need to come up with good naming schemes which allow us to find our files. We need to decide several times a day in which folder a file should go – should it go into folder A or B or should I create a subfolder? In the end there is always a little bit of chaos, even with the most structured minds. Alessandro tried a different approach in his project: save and load documents based on meta data and annotations rather than file and folder names.

This is not an easy task but I dare say that he succeeded. Alessandro created two new dialogs for saving and loading documents (we do not talk about files anymore – way too technical). The saving dialog allows to create arbitrary annotations for the document using the Nepomuk annotation plugin system which also brings in Scribo text analysis features. The loading dialog on the other hand uses a fancy filter system to narrow down the list of documents to open.

Saving Documents

We start by looking at the document saving dialog. Our example is KWord from which we want to save a fancy little text document. (No, it is not a test document, I really wrote this, this is real data, I assure you! … Yeah, OK, I admit it, just random words…) Hitting the save button opens up the new smart save dialog as can be seen in the screenshot below.

Smart Saving of a KWord document

The first thing we notice is that there is no filename and no folder selection. Name and folder are selected by Nepomuk. However, we get to give the document a name (it makes things much easier for us later on) and a description (in a future version applications will be able to prefill these fields with some meaningful defaults). But the interesting part is the meta data. The dialog suggests certain possible annotations which we can approve). Below the recently used annotations we have the possiblity to add any annotation we want through the existing Nepomuk annotation system. Last but not least we can give the document a type. This type does not identify the document on a mime-type level but much more real-life oriented. The idea is that users either define their own types based on pimo:Document or use ontologies that provide them. Typical examples include invoices or letters or project descriptions. This way documents are saved on a much higher abstraction level than with the classical file chooser: instead of a text file we save an invoice.

Once we specified the meta data we want to apply to the new document and hit the save button the smart save dialog generates a folder and file name and saves the document. We do not need to care about the location.

(Hint: there are certainly situations in which we want to use the classic file chooser. That is why the smart save dialog allows to switch over to the old ways by the simple click of a button.)

Loading Documents

But if documents are saved in some random folder which we do not know, how do we find them again? Well, that is the real beauty of the new approach. The idea is that you tell the open dialog what you want to open by specifying some details that you remember.

Let us have a look at the smart open dialog as it opens from within Okular.

We see two main views: on the left hand side we see a list of filters and on the right hand side we see a long list of files/documents. This might look overwhelming in the beginning but wait until we specify the first detail about the document we want to open: we tell the dialog that the document has mime type image/png (Yes, in the future this will look less technical) and the file view changes only showing png images.

These are still way too many to search for the one we need, so we give more detail. We remember that we accessed the document sometime this week:

Again the list of files is changed and now after only choosing two filters we are down to seven documents to choose from. Although this would be enough we do one better just to show that the filter system obviously also includes manual annotations such as tags:

And after activating the tag filter we are down to a single document. Nice, isn’t it?

A Few Technical Details

There are a few technical aspects worth mentioning about Alessandro’s work.

First of all: he makes direct use of Adam’s work on the virtual folders. The file list on the right is a simple KDirModel listing a nepomuksearch:/?sparql=… query. I find this very nice as my two students shared knowledge and discussed their work to find good solutions to their problems.

The second thing I find important is the creation of the filter list. The list of filters is created dynamically based on the existing annotations of the files in the current selection. In essence the idea is to only show filters that would actually change the list of available files (as you can see in the last screenshot this does not work 100% yet but we are close).

The GUI is obviously a prototype and we hope that you will give feedback and ideas to improve its usability. As Adam, Alessandro will continue working on KDE and Nepomuk and the smart file dialog will evolve until KDE 4.4.

Try It

To test the smart file dialog you need three things:

1. My kdelibs patch which makes the KFileDialog pluggable. This is actually a very simple one as the file dialog already loads the backend from a separate lib. While you are on it, please review the patch so it can get into KDE 4.4.
2. The Nepomuk-KDE playground module which also contains the smart save dialog. I recommend installing the whole module as the smart save dialog makes use of pretty much every Nepomuk lib available.
3. Tell KFileDialog to load the smartfilemodule instead of the default by adding “file module=smartfilemodule” into the “KFileDialog Settings” group of kdeglobals.

Obviously nepomuk needs to be enabled for it to work. Have fun.

A Nepomuk Vision

It is always a pleasure being able to blog about someone else writing about Nepomuk. In this case it is Danté Ashton giving his vision of the Nepomuk and Scribo enabled semantic desktop. He has some very nice ideas and I hope that his words will encourage some more people to join the Nepomuk development team (we could really use the help).

The First Nepomuk Workshop – It’s a Wrap

The first Nepomuk workshop and the first KDE workshop held in Freiburg ever is over. It was great but short. I could have worked on with these guys for much longer. It was a lot of fun to explain the Nepomuk ideas directly and having people not only listening but also understanding and realizing them.

On Friday we started out slowly. Due to different travel times and also some stupidity from travel agencies and German bus drivers we were only complete at around sixish. To get in the mood I had everyone explain what they wanted to achieve over the weekend or what they thought could be interesting to work on with Nepomuk. The beginning was not easy, at least I feared that we would have trouble to actually getting to work. After all, you do not start to work with Nepomuk just like that. It is too confusing and different for that. But the ideas were very good and the people very interested and eager.

So on Saturday my fears of me not being able to handle it were vanished. I explained about PIMO (just to confuse everyone for real) and showed what I had done with respect to NLP in the Scribo project (Tom already mentioned it in his blog although he confused it with PIMO. No big deal, there are way too many project and technology names to get mixed up). Sebastian Faubel showed his very interesting work on a replacement for the Gnome open and save file dialog. He also uses RDF to store meta data and then based on that decides on a location for the documents in a fixed (not really fixed but based on a template) folder tree. After that coding began.

What did we do?

Well, I did not really code anything. There was no time for that. I was too busy discussing with and helping the others. And they did do cool stuff. Let me start by mentioning my hero of the weekend: Tobias König aka tokoe. He wanted to improve the performance of the Akonadi Nepomuk feeder agents which export contact and email meta data from Akonadi to Nepomuk. He did that by introducing a new fast mode into the nepomuk resource generator. Now he would not be tokoe if he would not have been shocked by the hack that is rcgen. So over the weekend he cleaned it up. He cursed, he sweated, he nearly went mad, but he did it! And since we defined it as a bug fix it is even in 4.3. Great work, Tobias.

Then there was Tom Albers. Now he already blogged about what he did himself. But I will summarize it anyway: he actually dared and integrated the Scribo-based annotation suggestions into Mailody. I will blog about details on that later. But the idea is that the email body is analysed and a plugin system generates possible annotations such as dates, cities, persons, and also possible events that are mentioned in the email. Not only did he integrate it into Mailody, he also found two bugs that would have been showstoppers for the Mandriva Scribo demo yesterday. So thanks a lot, Tom.

Raptor. Now Raptor is a cool project. Raptor sets out to replace or provide an alternative to Kickoff. And their idea for Nepomuk integration is to remember the launches of applications. For starters “only” when an application was launched. This then allows to show more frequently used applications with bigger icons. But it will not stop there. Application launches can be linked to the current context (or the current Plasma activity). I might use KPresenter at work all the time but never at home. Also it would be possible to link files to the application launch that was used to open them. And so on. Alessandro, Francesco, and Lukas quickly understood how to create and ontology and use it in KDE. They now have their dedicated application launch ontology and use it via the Nepomuk libs in Raptor. I hope that the ontology can at some point be made into somewhat of a standard in the desktop ontology project.

Daniel, while normally being an Amarok developer (he did the Nepomuk integration in the GSoC last year), was very eager on making Nepomuk really useful on the basic level. So we discussed handling of removable storage and nicer resource URI design a lot. In the end we decided:

1. All files will have a random URI that never changes.
2. All file systems will be represented in Nepomuk with their mount point and their mount status (Daniel already started working on the service that handles that. Also the tracker guys are working on something similar. Matching the ontologies should be fairly easy as the concepts are the same.)
3. All file URLs will be relative.
4. All files will have a link to their storing file system.

This helps in solving a bunch of problems. Files on removable storages like USB sticks which can be mounted in different places are handled the exact same way as files on local file systems. Moving a file in most cases only means to update one property: the relative URL. Only if the file is moved to another file system that link has to be changed, too. Through the mount state flag on the file system in Nepomuk it is very simple to see if a file is currently available or not. A search client can simply tell the user that they have to mount the file system in question to access the file. I think this is a fine solution and since I tried to design everything without relying on the file resource’s URI being the file’s URL the transition should be fairly simply. A goal for 4.4.

George already blogged about his Nepomuk integration work with Telepathy. What is so great about his work is that he actually uses PIMO in a productive way: one PIMO Person represents one person that can be contacted via Telepathy. And this one pimo:Person has a set of occurrences being the actual contacts like jabber accounts and so on. Thus, if you want to chat with a person you simply click their icon and Telepathy will open one of the available systems, depending on their online status. One could even think of email as a fallback. I find this especially interesting since it so clearly uses the two different layers of information defined via the PIMO ontology: on the lower level we have all the desktop resources like files and emails and jabber accounts and so on. And on a higher level we have all the real world entities like the actual person or a project or a city represented by PIMO concepts. I hope that we will see more integration like this is the future. (I know, I know, I need to write better documentation on this.)

Marcel worked on the Nepomuk integration in Digikam. Since the Digikam team does not want to entirely rely on Nepomuk yet (with it being optional and all) he created a Nepomuk service that keeps the Digikam database and Nepomuk in sync. So rating and tagging your images in Digikam would directly be reflected in Nepomuk and the other way around. Very nice. I hope to see this hitting a stable release soon.

I had hoped to have more time to work with Peter on the meta data display in Dolphin. But sadly that dropped under the table a bit. But I was at least able to show him my crappy formatting rule system I drafted a while back and we cleaned up the display a bit: nicer labels and less useless properties shown.

What did we look like?

What about the future?

I hope that we can do this again soon. I think it was really worth it and am very happy to have done it. Thanks again to all of you. You made this a successful event.

PS: I wanted to blog earlier but first I had to sleep for two days straight. I am too old for this shit! ;)