Nepomuk Brings Semantic Web To the Desktop, Instead

An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review has a story looking at Nepomuk — the semantic tool that is bundled with the latest version of KDE. It seems that some Semantic Web researchers believe the tool will prove a breakthrough for semantic technology. By encouraging people to add semantic meta-data to the information stored on their machines they hope it could succeed where other semantic tools have failed."

Um, no thanks

[by Anonymous Coward]

I've tried Symantec products in the past, and they are worse than actually having a virus. They slow your PC to a crawl, get their claws into every part of your computer, and are extremely difficult to purge when you finally give up on them.

Re:Um, no thanks

[pitchpipe (708843)]

You sound like an anti-Semitic asshole to me. ;^)

Re:

[Dr.Dubious DDQ (11968)]

"A virus?"

Well, why not? Isn't that what WINE [vnunet.com] is for?...

Re:

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

Whoosh

Didn't you get the memo [slashdot.org]?
That should read:

"You may have Frontotemporal Dementia [wikipedia.org]. Please see your physician."

Care to explain?

[Leafheart (1120885)]

What exactly is semantic web, and why haven't I ever heard of it?

Re:

[orkybash (1013349)]

It describes the ability to add metadata to web content (tags, etc), and you haven't heard of it because web 2.0 is the more popular term. ;)

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[thermian (1267986)]

It describes the ability to add metadata to web content (tags, etc), and you haven't heard of it because web 2.0 is the more popular term. ;)

Personally I think that metadata/tag based systems are the wrong road for semantic analysis of web pages. As soon as the semantics of a thing is decided by additional information added to describe that thing, its open to abuse.

The only advantage is its faster than what should be done, which is using good old maths to extract the true 'meaning' of a document or object.

Its not hard. Well, ok, its a little hard. Oh ok, its really rather difficult, but there are plenty of places you can get example code or libr

Re:

[thermian (1267986)]

Semantic information is not more or less trustworthy than the document itself.

Well, no. Its possible using some admittedly complex math, to strip out all but the core meaning of a document. Its very hard to hide the meaningful content of a page from properly done semantic analysis. I know this because I've done that kind of thing before (deliberately vague mode active here, sorry).

It offers a useful perspective though. If the costs of storing data in a way that preserves more information are low, why not do it.

True, true, but if that additional data conveys less meaning then correct raw document analysis, it becomes potentially less useful. I would be against the cost of storing it, but then that's me.

I think tag

Re:

[grcumb (781340)]

It describes the ability to add metadata to web content (tags, etc), and you haven't heard of it because web 2.0 is the more popular term. ;)

Wrong and wrong. Sort of. 8^)

The Semantic Web is the term coined by Tim Berners Lee, describing the ability to associate data using inference (rather than explicit reference). In his conception, it relies on XML data formats and the ability to use common elements to translate between one and the other.

It's not a terribly easy concept to grok at first, but the basic premise is that in data transformation, you only need to know the two steps closest to you in order to translate (and process) data from numerou

Re:Care to explain?

[mcgrew (92797)]

I'm dubious

I have yet to see "semantic web" fully explained, but Wikipedia is giving some good insight [wikipedia.org] into it, especially into its nebulousness. It is supposed to make web (or in this case, desktop) documents machine-readable.

TFA deals not with the Semantic Web, but rather the "semantic desktop". As it says, "Semantic Web researchers believe the tool will prove a breakthrough for semantic technology. By encouraging people to add semantic meta-data to the information stored on their machines they hope it could succeed where other semantic tools have failed".

HTML had "semantic tools" built in - keywords.
<meta meta name="description" content="Auto Mechanics">
<meta name="keywords" content="auto, mechanincs, wrench, sex, penis, tits, clit, boobs">

You see how it was abused. Any more advanced semantic tools will be similarly abused.

There are other problems, as the wikipedia article explains:

Practical feasibility
Critics question the basic feasibility of a complete or even partial fulfillment of the semantic web. Some develop their critique from the perspective of human behavior and personal preferences, which ostensibly diminish the likelihood of its fulfillment (see e.g., metacrap). Other commentators object that there are limitations that stem from the current state of software engineering itself (see e.g., Leaky abstraction).

Where semantic web technologies have found a greater degree of practical adoption, it has tended to be among core specialized communities and organizations for intra-company projects.[12] The practical constraints toward adoption have appeared less challenging where domain and scope is more limited than that of the general public and the World-Wide Web.[12]

[edit] An unrealized idea
The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web.[13] Such an evolution has yet to occur. Indeed, a more recent article from Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized."[14]

[edit] Censorship and privacy
Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding censorship and privacy. For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of FOAF files and geo location meta-data, there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog.

[edit] Doubling output formats
Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this kind of criticism.

Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in HTML pages. The GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language) mechanism allows existing material (including microformats) to be automatically interpreted as RDF, so publishers only need to use a single format, such as HTML.

Semantic Web Article in CACM

[raddan (519638)]

There's actually a pretty good introduction to the semantic web in this month's Communications of the ACM [acm.org]. You're right when you say that the semantic web is, as yet, mostly unrealized. But it has huge potential.

Relational databases were in the same position in the late 60's/early 70's. We needed ways to combine and extract information automatically with a simple and expressive language. Relational database management systems, combined with SQL were the result of that, and they were a smashing succes

Re:

[eihab (823648)]

If web content is readable and meaningful to me than it already has inherent meaning. Semantic tagging duplicates effort.

Semantic web is also about accessibility. Take a blind person for example surfing the web using a screen reader, do you have any idea how horrible his/her browsing experience would be like in the web today?

[Robotic voice]
Document Title - Slashdot | Nepomuk Brings Semantic ..
Document Body
Stories - Anchor link
Slash boxes - Anchor link
Comments - Anchor link
Search
Form field - Text - Query
Submit button - Search
New for nerds, stuff that matters
Hello eihab! - Link
Help & Preferences - Link ....

Click on a different page, and there you go listening to the same headers _again_. It can get very frustrating.

Without semantics there's no easy way for a screen reader (or other accessibility enabling devices) to successfully translate a document to something intelligible and usable.

You can see how a pho

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

"Semantics" is information about meaning (whereas syntax is information about form). Semantic tools try to provide meaning by describing relationships between information atoms. The goal is to create systems which can answer questions like "how old is the president's oldest child?" with just the age, instead of listing all documents which contain the words "old" "president" "oldest" and "child".

Re:Care to explain?

[radtea (464814)]

The Semantic Web is a failed attempt to extend the WWW via "semantic markup", which allows users/editors/etc to tag content (text, images, data) using a standard format that can be read, processed and exchanged by machines which can then give users more useful pointers to stuff that they care about.

The Semantic Web has failed for a bunch of reasons, with many people tending to blame the tools. However, those of us of a particular epistemological bent believe that it is doomed in principle as current conceived because "meaning" is a verb, not an adjective.

"These data mean X" is completely incoherent on this view of meaning, like saying "This smell of orange blossoms has Republican leanings." "Meaning" is simply not an attribute of data, any more than political tendencies are an attribute of scents.

The Semantic Web fails to capture almost everything about the entities that do the meaning (people) but instead is based on the belief that meaning is a property of data. Data inspires meaning, but meaning is something that humans do, and the Semantic Web has no effective mechanism for capturing this, although with sufficient markup by many individuals on the same data it should be possible to do something similar to ROC evaluation of the ways people mean, which would greatly enhance the utility of the Semantic Web.

A colleague who works in GIS pointed out an consequence of this phenomena to me many years ago when he described an experiment involving a bunch of geologists mapping a particular terrain. At the end of the day, after integrating all their inputs, he could tell who mapped where, but not what anybody mapped.

Re:Care to explain?

[Dynedain (141758)]

I've got a better reason why it failed that doesn't require delving into first year philosophy.

People are lazy. Look at any image database and figure out why it's difficult to find something. Because people don't want to spend 20 minutes filling in tags for a single image they just want to show off to their friends.

Now expand that to every other form of data type, and its easy to see why the semantic web never did, and never will take off without significant AI involvement.

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[azgard (461476)]

Not only that, but also, businesses are control freaks and do not like their websites to be easily processed by machines. They could just open their databases as well.

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[Chelloveck (14643)]

People are lazy. Look at any image database and figure out why it's difficult to find something. Because people don't want to spend 20 minutes filling in tags for a single image they just want to show off to their friends.

And even when they do fill in the tags, they're sloppy about it. Things get misspelled and mislabeled all the time. Most people are very inconsistent about labeling even when they're trying their best to do an honest, thorough job. Okay, let me tag this photo "wife", because has my wife

That's the idea.

[Balinares (316703)]

> ... the semantic web never did, and never will take off without significant AI involvement.

I understand that the point of Nepomuk is to allow for automated tagging by the standard tools of the KDE desktop. For instance, say you receive a picture from an IM contact who KDE also knows (through the address book framework, Akonadi) lives in Europe.

Then Nepomuk would allow you to make search queries as "Bring up all the pictures that people living in Europe sent me last week". Well, that's the theoretical goal anyway; we will see if they ever get there.

There's one nifty application already: you can create a Folder View plasmoid on your desktop, and instead of making it display ~/Desktop/ as usual, you can make it display the result of a query through the Nepomuk KIO slave. See here [osnews.com] how it works.

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[e2d2 (115622)]

Man, I want to get my hand on some of those Orange Blossoms you got! Two and then pass it man, don't hog it.

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[giuntag (833437)]

Explained better than I could ever do: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm [well.com]

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[anomalous cohort (704239)]

I disagree. First of all, the semantic web is just about allowing content creators to associate context with their content [blogspot.com] to facilitate a context sensitive search. The semantic web has lackluster adoption because google does a great job at context sensitive search without the context providing meta-data markup.

A more limited version of semantic web has achieved some notable traction. Microformats [blogspot.com] are another way of associating context with content that is more agreeable with content providers.

A more c

You got that exactly backwards

[MarkusQ (450076)]

The Semantic Web is a failed attempt to extend the WWW via "semantic markup", which allows users/editors/etc to tag content (text, images, data) using a standard format that can be read, processed and exchanged by machines which can then give users more useful pointers to stuff that they care about.

You got that exactly backwards.

The WWW was an earlier doomed attempt at semantic markup, and up until the summer of '93 or so it looked like it might work. That's when the early rants about people using the tags to control layout instead of too convey meta information (e.g. using em to get italics in a bibliography, dt/dd to make roman numeral lists, etc.) started--or at least when I first became aware of them. In fact, pretty much the entire history of HTML has been a tension between the language's designers and purist, who want users to care about what markup means, even if it does nothing, and the vast majority of users who only care about what it does regardless of the "meaning" that may be ascribed to it. Once you can get your head around both perspectives some of the goofier things in the whole tawdry history (the Table Wars, XML, CSS) make a lot more sense.

Ok, a little more sense. But only if you already knew what people are like.

--MarkusQ

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[hey! (33014)]

Actually, I'd say it's too early to say that the Semantic Web has failed. What has clearly failed for now is the vision for how the technology was to be used.

For one thing, it turned out that really, really clever textual matching is a lot more powerful than anybody thought possible. Twenty years or so ago, you'd have thought that you'd need to have some kind of sophisticated metadata to do the kinds of stuff we take for granted in Google today. I turns out that a technology that turns a needle in a hay

Re:

[QuantumRiff (120817)]

Basically, think of the tags that are at the bottom of slashdot articles. You can tag them with things like PATRIOT ACT, or EFF, or whatever, and in theory, its going to help you search slashdot and get more relavant articles in your search. Now, when you add that capability to the unwashed internet masses, you see things like story tags with "No" or "itsatrap" or whatever crap people think is funny, which is funny, but ruins its main purpose of helping people find information. Multiply that by the numbe

As a KDE 4 user...

[orkybash (1013349)]

I've tried out Nepomuk and, while I have to say that it's promising, it's got miles to go before it's even near ready. The main problem is application support. Sure, you can rate and tag and describe your files in the Dolphin file browser. So what? You can do the same in Vista. This doesn't mean anything if applications don't hook into this and make use of it. Of the apps I've used, Gwenview (a photo viewer) has Nepomuk partially implemented but it's buggy and you need to compile it yourself with it explicitly enabled (this will apparently change in KDE 4.2). Digikam, which allows you to rate, tag, and describe photos already, says that they have no plans of integrating with Nepomuk anytime soon. Amarok 2 has work towards a Nepomuk collection, but the devs say that this will always run along side the main, MySql-based collection and it's nowhere near ready yet. My email is in the cloud so I can't even begin to talk about KDE-PIM's support or lack thereof.

The other problem at the moment is a lack of ability to query your semantic data. Can I get anything to show all photos with my wife in them that I've rated four or above? Not at the moment. Hopefully this is coming in KDE 4.2, but as it stands at the moment it makes Nepomuk a case of write-only memory.

So, maybe something to get excited about in the future, but not quite yet.

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[Blakey Rat (99501)]

I still don't get the case for semantic-web, -desktop, -anything.

I think one of the reasons people are slow to adopt it is because people don't know what the heck it is, or can't imagine how it could benefit them in any way.

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[JasterBobaMereel (1102861)]

So currently it is just Yet another tagging system .. .that has the ability of sharing the tags with your friends ... the data on my computer is private... that's why it is on my computer and not on my Facebook/MySpace/Bebo etc site....

Another poorly implemented, mis-aimed application by I researchers ...!?

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

Can I get anything to show all photos with my wife in them that I've rated four or above?

Another problem is that you have to have it tagged, if you don't tag all the images with a given person in it, then it's not going to show up in a search.

I think that's also an issue with Semantic web too, not only do items have to be tagged, the tags have to be accurate and trustworthy. It sounds like a nice system that can be undone by a bunch of tag spamming bozos. It will work better under a controlled environment.

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[Fri13 (963421)]

Just use digiKam for photos. You can search photos by all metadata what is included to photos. Even that digiKam uses SQlite, you can sync metadata between database and photos.

In future, there should come a API to sync database with nepomuk. But currently not planned because nepomuk is not so well implented for KDE4 or the KDE4 at all. Just like all can notice that you cant search files any other way easily than using the kickoff or lancelot menu search bar.

Horrible name.

[haeger (85819)]

NepoMUCK? Anything ending in "MUCK" doesn't sound like a good product. The concept is very interesting but the name isn't the best I've seen.

I'm glad that they don't prefix everything with K though.

Yes, I know that Nepomuk means "Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge" as stated in the article.

.haeger

Re:Horrible name.

[Cornwallis (1188489)]

Agreed. They ought to call it NepoGIMP. Now that's a name.

On the brighter side...

[Cyberax (705495)]

It's not as bad as GIMP :)

Re:Horrible name.

[shadwstalkr (111149)]

Yes, I know that Nepomuk means "Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge" as stated in the article.

I assumed it was KumOpen (come open) backwards. I think the real acronym is even stupider than that.

Re:Horrible name.

[Znork (31774)]

Yep, that was my first thought as well. Quickly followed by wondering if 'into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations' was some kind of euphemism for, eh, group pr0n of some kind.

Oh, well, either they have much less dirty minds than mine, or someone's desire for well-indexed pr0n browsing has gotten slightly out of hand.

Re:

[kwandar (733439)]

The name MUD didn't seem to bother users and MUDs were (maybe still are?) quite popular. I don't think your concerns hold up.

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[oren (78897)]

Neopmuk was the half-dragon in "Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver". His mother was a Hippopotamus. Pleasant enough character and all, but I hope the code looks more like the excellent book and less like a half-dragon, half-hippopotamus hybrid. Yuck!

Cluster analysis

[bigattichouse (527527)]

I've been experimenting with metadata and blogs, and specifically the cluster analysis of those conversations on the web - so far so good ( http://www.wallcloud.net/ [wallcloud.net] ). I'm really interested in seeing how our desktops change as our information starts "clumping" together for us - our contacts, files, work items, etc arranging themselves on screen. I'd love to have a dev tool that would allow me to right click and jump to the SQL table I'm hovering in the code, and maybe gesture to bring up jobs that inter

Typical flameware

[genner (694963)]

Everyone is just argueing about semantics.

I doubt it will catch on...

[Angostura (703910)]

And I'll tell you why.

The Nepomuk Web site wants to make me chew my own arm off. Now, I'm familar with the Semantic Web, I'm excited by the idea of semantic organisation. But this site is the epitome of grim, lifeless European research-ese. It completely fails to convey the technological approach, how it works, or why you should give a damn. I get the impression that the team was more interested in the EC funding then actually developing a disruptive technology.

Why why can't researchers spend 15 minutes thinking about how to convey the importance and excitement of what they are trying to do in terms of practical examples.

I'm afraid you'll probably have to wait until some enterprising 3rd party to grab the source and build some of the technology into a different product.

Re:

[contra_mundi (1362297)]

Try http://nepomuk.kde.org/ [kde.org]

Re:

[leobard (1066778)]

The Nepomuk Web site wants to make me chew my own arm off.

ha, good one.

Why why can't researchers spend 15 minutes thinking about how to convey the importance and excitement of what they are trying to do in terms of practical examples.

There are some, but they are not very elegant:

http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/UsingNepomuk [semanticdesktop.org]
http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/UsingDropBox [semanticdesktop.org]
Or check out the KDE stuff:
http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user [kde.org]
also in cute little moving pictures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8oavLQeAjM [youtube.com]

Shmemantic

[Hognoxious (631665)]

Semantic shmemantic. It's so 2008, let it go.

Let's have a new buzzword for 2009. I nominate "emotional".

Redundant

[bjourne (1034822)]

All information is semantic. This slashdot post is information encoded using English semantics. Unfortunately for the machines, the English semantics are way to complicated for them to understand. So they need a simpler set of grammar rules to be able to parse it. But why would anyone want to waste time marking it up just for the benefit of machine readability when google basically can accomplish the same thing without all that metadata markup cruft?

Metacrap rant from Corey Doctorow

[pzs (857406)]

There's a good rant from Corey Doctorow about this [well.com]. I think the best phrase that summaries people's high hopes for the semantic web is "nerd hubris".

This indexing fad should curl up and die

[flyingfsck (986395)]

Everybody and his uncle tries to make systems that will index every piece of crap on your PC and it invariably results in a useless and horrible waste of resources. The biggest annoyance is trying to figure out how to turn these damn things off. Considering that the average user only searches for something once in several years, an on-demand search system makes far more sense.

Re:

[freddy_dreddy (1321567)]

Well said. Where are those mod-points when you need them.

Re:This indexing fad should curl up and die

[lennier (44736)]

"Everybody and his uncle tries to make systems that will index every piece of crap on your PC and it invariably results in a useless and horrible waste of resources."

On the contrary, we should seriously be asking ourselves *why*, when all our data is sitting there on our PCs, we've let ourselves get into such a state of disorganisation at the operating system level that a class of program called 'indexer' exists as a third-party tool in the first place.

How come it's not already taken as given that the primary thing an operating system *does* is, you know, *know where all its data is*?

It's as if we're living in an age before 'directories' were invented - or before databases had 'indexes' and 'queries' - and we have to manually write down and key in raw sector numbers every time we open a file. And we're okay with that, because we think - and teach - that that's 'just how computers work'. We've accepted that there's a whole class of things our computers can't do 'because there's no application to do that'.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Oops. Apparently it directs back to the ads.

[gardyloo (512791)]

Sorry about that.

Re:

[maxwell demon (590494)]

1) Everything must be tagged.

Easy: Just have a bot add "untagged" tags to everything not yet tagged. Then it's tagged, because it's tagged "untagged".

2) Information must be TRUE (otherwise you will get bad deductions).

Also easy: Just remove all wrong information before making your deduction. OK, so how is the computer to know what is wrong? Well, that's of course again semantic information, so just tag anything wrong as "wrong". If some "wrong" tagging happens to be wrong, you can still tag that as "wrong"

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[Tacvek (948259)]

Even if one is using a proper reference frame (not a rotating one), there is still an outward force in the system, namely the reactionary force to the centripetal force. Said reactionary force could legitimately be called a centrifugal force, but it is a force applied to the central object, not on the outer object, which distinguishes it from what people usually mean when they say centrifugal force.

But this is really quite off-topic.