New to KDE4: NEPOMUK

    I think everyone who is at least a little bit interested in the world of software technology in the open source camp, has heard about the new KDE branch, which has number 4. This version of KDE brought with it a lot of new products about which Habré has already been talked about. This is Solid , and Phonon , and Plasma , and Decibel . But did you know that KDE4 has one more thing that was not in previous versions? This contraption is called NEPOMUK-KDE .

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    [NEPOMUK]
    Honestly, for the Russian ear this word sounds somehow, well, quite unusual. But this is not a word at all, it is an abbreviation: Network Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge .

    NEPOMUK's main idea is metadata.

    [metadata]
    What is metadata?
    Meta - label. It turns out that metadata is a label to the data?
    In fact, metadata is information to information. For example, I have a Within Temptation music file - Angels.mp3 . If you open this file in some audio editor or audio player, we will see the file metadata - information about the author, song title, year of release of the song or album, genre and more.
    Metadata can contain almost anything. Another question is how to distinguish metadata from data.
    Metadata is also data. This means that metadata can have its own metadata, and those, in turn, have their own metadata.

    [metadata types] There
    are three types of metadata:

    • Metadata that can be found in files stored on your hard drive. This is data such as tags in audio files, access time to a file, or simply indexed text. This is the simplest metadata that can be indexed at any time. And it is these data that are the main goal of projects such as Beagle and Strigi ;
    • Metadata created by the user himself. In the simplest cases, this can be a comment on a file or combining several files into one group (tags);
    • And the most interesting and at the same time the most complex type of metadata, which is very difficult to collect, because it is not stored for long, and it is not created manually by the user. An example of such metadata is the URL from where the file was downloaded from the Internet. After the file is downloaded, the URL information is completely lost. Or another example. The user received an email with an attachment. As soon as the user has saved the attachment to the hard drive, the connection of the attachment with the letter in which it arrived is lost. This means that we will no longer know where this investment came from, from which letter. These are just the simplest examples.

    NEPOMUK's goal is to be able to manage all three types of metadata listed above.

    [why do we need metadata if it would have gone well without them? ]
    But see for yourself. Just an example on electric books and electrophotographs.
    Personally, I have a good collection of electric books sorted by catalogs. I have a guide for iptables (packet filter on Linux). In terms of meaning, this guide fits both the OS / Linux category and the IT Security category. Where to put the document? Where then to look for it?

    I have many photographs that depict different people and places. All photos have a name like this: 45DE1.jpg
    Friends come to me and ask me to show the amazing nature of Sakhalin. Uh ... how do I find the pictures I need? Scroll through the entire collection? And if it consists of thousands of pictures? Sort nature photos in advance into a separate catalog? And if the pictures are not only nature, but there are people? How then to look for photographs with people if they lie on the same heap with nature?

    This is where metadata helps us. One commonly used type of metadata is tags. In order not to go far, I will show that you can see tags on Habré (they are also tags). It is very convenient, is not it, to click on the Google tag and get all the topics related to the topics of the popular search engine.

    By the way, you can also rate files. For example, audio files on the basis of the like / dislike principle. Well, or any other principle, choose for yourself. =)

    In the case of the book, I can put linux, it security tags . In the case of photographs, I can put the tags Sakhalin, Petya, Masha .
    Then I don’t have to scour the file system, I just click on the desired tag and get a list of files.

    This begs the question: why now you need to sort the files, rename them, if we can hang tags and get the desired file regardless of its name and location in the file system? I have no answer to this question.

    [metadata and human issue]
    Unfortunately, man is a lazy creature. If he is too lazy to give a sane name to the file, then why did we get the idea that he would not be “broken off” by setting tags for files?
    I do not know the answer to this question either. Therefore, we are waiting for an advanced system of automatic tagging.

    [in conclusion]
    Today, NEPOMUK is certainly not capable of everything. But this is still a young project, the rapid development of which is yet to come.

    Finally, a couple of screenshots.

    NEPOMUK integrated into the KDE4 Dolphin file manager (pay attention to the column on the right) :
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    NEPOMUK & Strigi:
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