Nepomuk Brings Semantic Web To the Desktop, Instead 140
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."
As a KDE 4 user... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Care to explain? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Care to explain? (Score:5, Informative)
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:
Re:I doubt it will catch on... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I doubt it will catch on... (Score:2, Informative)
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]
Re:Care to explain? (Score:3, Informative)
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 as the subject. And "boat" because she's standing on a boat. And "ocean", because that's where the boat is. Better make that "Atlantic Ocean". Let's add the month, year, and day, too. And the time of day. There. Now I can query for "all pictures of my wife in the Atlantic on a dark and stormy night". Oh, wait, I forgot to tag the weather...
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the problem of people just plain lying about their data to make it more appealing to possible viewers. I want the picture to show in search engines, so I'll tag it "nude", "pr0n", and "teen". Those tags have nothing to do with the picture, of course, but they'll get it noticed.
I don't expect a Semantic Revolution to happen as long as fallible, inconsistent, lying, cheating humans are in the loop.
That's the idea. (Score:5, Informative)
> ... 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.