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Since I am missing important features from the kdedevelopers.org blog system I am moving my blog to wordpress. From now on all Nepomuk related blogs will be posted there.

Amazing how long it always takes for me to write a log entry. So many times in the last months I told myself I had to write the next entry... well, new year's resolution (a little late I know): more blogging about what I am up to (regarding KDE of course). Read More

I always thought that some KDE apps looked a bit cluttered. Yesterday I finally tried to do something about it. I started with Gwenview. Two things bothered me: 1. the status bar buttons were too small for their text. Easy to solve by simply not forcing the height of the statusbar. 2. the sidebar had a different color than the status bar. Now this is due to Oxygen using gradients which is cool. It turned out to be rather simple. And this is also the actual reason for this blog. Read More

It has been a while since I blogged. The reason is simple: the birth of my daughter turned my brain upside down (as in: "as far as I can tell there exists only one thing in the whole world and it is not this blog"). Now, thousands of hours of staring at her later (and also after the very successful last Nepomuk project review) I am finally back to blogging. Read More

The new Strigi service a blogged about before is in svn trunk now. With it Strigi is now enabled by default. But that is no need to be alarmed. I think it behaves quite nicely. After 1 hour and 42 minutes of initial indexing (I did not feel any slowdown of the system in that time) I got this: Read More

It took me one and a half day and Jos will not be happy about it. That is because I have to start this blog entry with apologizing to him: Read More

No, I did not forget about the virtual folders, but I also did not implement subfolders or a graphical query editor. Shame on me, I know. I thought it was more important to focus on stability and a clean API first. And that is what I did. Read More

After more than two weeks of vacation I read up on my email and of course am also sickened by some of the stuff I have to read there. Let me open with a quote: Read More

Really. I just got my awesome KDE metal gear award for my work on K3b and I have to say: work of art. This is so cool and such an honor. I can't find better or more words.... Read More

Well, maybe "The Next Level" is overstating it but I improved the query API a lot. Not only can we now properly handle all sorts of literal comparisons but we can also use plain SPARQL queries. The latter allow some nice stuff like "Recent Files". Read More

Virtual Folders in KDE You can tag files, you can annotate them, Strigi indexes your files, I showed how to create new information types and things, but you could not really use it. I suspect you want to find the things again by searching for it. Well, I don't think we should search. We should simply find! Read More

Now what is that supposed to mean? The "real" Nepomuk? Well, you did not actually think that I would introduce an RDF store into KDE just to save some tags and ratings? No, the "real" motivation goes way beyond that and it is time to hint at it. Today I committed the PIMOShell to the Nepomuk playground (To the right you see the PIMOShell main window showing all xesam:Music resources). Read More

We probably all know the situation: I finally fixes the last bug in Soprano. Yes, I know, there probably is no such thing as the last bug. But it feels good to lie to myself in this case. The redesigned Nepomuk server is done and it works smoothly. First of all, the Nepomuk Server is no KDED module anymore. So no more 90% CPU load for KDED. It was to heavyweight for KDED anyway. As a recently learned KDED was never intended to be a general purpose service daemon but a manager for small and stable modules. So now the Nepomuk server has its own service management including dependencies handling. Each Nepomuk service runs in its own child process and can be controlled through D-Bus, either through the Nepomuk server's service manager or the processes interface directly (The idea of course is not new: I took the ProcessControl class from Akonadi, thanks guys). This has several advantages: Read More

Some words on performance Nepomuk performance has always been a bit of a problem. Last but not least this was due to the D-Bus communication with the Nepomuk server that took place all the time. Don't get me wrong, D-Bus is pretty fast, but you always get the overhead of the marshalling of messages and routing them through the D-Bus daemon. So with the new QLocalServer and QLocalSocket in QT 4.4 which introduce Windows compatibility, I re-enabled the Soprano local socket communication which is a lot faster. Now the Nepomuk server provides two interfaces: the good old and very easy to use D-Bus interface and the fast binary local socket interface. (The latter is barely documented since it is only intended for Soprano itself through Soprano::Client::LocalSocketClient). To use the new interface one could of course create and instance of LocalSocketClient but that is not recommended for two reasons: Read More

Now that the Nepomuk project review is done I can get back to promoting Nepomuk features and possibilities. Today I will show how existing Nepomuk and Soprano technologies can be combined to provide very simple "Social" capabilities. In a previous blog entry I presented the Nepomuk search client which allows to search the Nepomuk data store based on installed types and properties. Now how about taking that, wrapping it in the simple Soprano tcp server/client system and announcing it via Avahi? That would allow us to query our buddies' Nepomuk data. I did exactly that and the result are two little tools with very fancy names: The Nepomuk Social Query Daemon and Client. Read More

I just commited the finalized KRatingPainter to svn trunk which allows to paint a rating value using any QPainter. I think it is quite nice since it allows to specify the alignment, a spacing, a custom icon, the maximum rating, a hover rating, and so forth. And I think it would be great if this class (and its easy-usage widget companion KRatingWidget) would be used throughout KDE whenever we want to display a rating value. Although it is part of the Nepomuk lib at the moment, it has no real dependancy here: the rating is a simple integer value. Read More

I am proud to announce that finally nepomuk.kde.org went online. A owe a big thank you to pinheiro who not only designed the new Nepomuk icon but also did the webpage layout. I also want to thank Luke Parry who adapted pinheiros design for Drupal. Last but not least Dirk Mueller went through the trouble to actually setup Drupal. Read More

In my previous posts I used some terms that probably need explaining. The following descriptions should not be used as basis for any exam and may very well scare some academic semantic web professionals, but they get me through the day. And I think they are sufficient to understand most of what is going on with Nepomuk data in KDE. Read More

Search - a very important topic when it comes to data in general. The same is true for metadata and all that is Nepomuk. I blogged about the virtual folders idea for KMail which will be realized through Nepomuk. But before that there is the "simple" desktop search. We know it from systems like Beagle or Strigi. With Nepomuk, however, a lot more is possible. We are just getting started. Read More

Last weekend I was invited to the KDE-PIM meeting in Osnabrück to represent Nepomuk. First of all I have to say: thanks a lot for inviting me, guys. The meeting was a lot of fun (although staying awake got harder during the course of the three days you crazy work-maniacs!) and it was great to see known faces again and meet new nice people. As they have during the last years Intevation hosted the event and I want to give a quick thanks to them, too. Read More

For many Nepomuk is a rather abstract thing. So I will not try to explain it as a project again. I will just show what I have been up to. Randomly... Read More

Why I failed before: I have no idea. Maybe the password mails got lost in the spam filter or I was just blind. Who knows. Important is that I am not using blogger which clee will like to hear (although I will be missing the WYSIWYG editor). Anyway, I got it now and I can start blogging about Nepomuk. Late, I know. I always tried to keep away from it but in the end, today there is no way around it. It simple seems the best way to inform people about my work. Read More