• Pimp my Nepomuk

Being both a really old KDE user and a semantic desktop partisan at the same time, I am, of course, keeping my eye on the progress in Nepomuk project.  It was apparently close to my old dream of a tagging framework supported natively and consistently across the whole desktop environment, so I highly appreciated this effort and it was nice to hear that Nepomuk would be officially included into KDE – my desktop of choice for many years.

Unfortunately, the experience was rather disappointing. It’s turned out to be painfully slow, not only slow by itself, but being a brake for overall desktop navigation. Even hovering the cursor over files and folders in Dolphin made Nepomuk process to eat above 50% of CPU time and caused annoying delays. The simple operations like assigning a tag to a file took seconds, the responsiveness which is obviously inappropriate for a real-world desktop system. It thus was turned off in a hope that the things would be improved in future versions (I was confused a bit by how it might appear in the production release, but, frankly, early KDE 4 was full of much more disastrous things). Since then, I checked it after every KDE version upgrade, but there was no visible progress in performance, alas.

It was really good news – the author of the post above argues that the performance issues are in fact, caused by a storage backend which Soprano, an RDF framework underlying to Nepomuk, uses to keep RDF data. By default, it’s shipped with Redland (aka librdf), an RDF database library written in C. Luckily, the backend is easily replaceable and it’s worth to try to install a faster alternative seeking for a better performance. The author recommends Sesame2 – a 100% pure Java RDF framework which works (surprisingly for many, I think – but not for me!) much faster than it’s native code counterpart.

I tested Nepomuk with Sesame and convinced that now it works really faster – as it should, in fact. There is of course, a room for improvements in Nepomuk to be a real end-user tool – e.g. a tag navigation interface without which the tags are rather useless, but its another story. At least, the performance is not a blocker anymore, so Nepomuk now is enabled in my KDE all the time.

For Kubuntu users: How-to

I tested the Sesame2 backend for Nepomuk on Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, KDE 4.3.0 and Sun JRE 6 (I have no idea if it works with GNU Java, but you can give it a try).

1. Install soprano-backend-sesame package (sudo apt-get install soprano-backend-sesame)
2. Make a symlink from $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386/client/libjvm.so in the /usr/lib directory
3. Restart Nepomuk server

Check if Sesame2 backend is used now:

qdbus org.kde.NepomukStorage /nepomukstorage usedSopranoBackend

It should answer “sesame2“. If it still answers “redland“, something was wrong. You may need also to replace the value “redland” to “sesame2” in ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc file manually and restart Nepomuk again.

“How does SCAN help me?”, “Why should I use it?”, “Who are the users?”, “Why it is smart?”, “Can it replace a …?”, “What is autotagging?”, technical tips-n-tricks, development questions and a lot of other things you would want to know about Smart Content Aggregation & Navigation technology.

Read SCAN FAQ »

(Read more on SCAN website)

About SCAN

“… the abundance of information will be such that either you have reached such a level of maturity that you are able to be your own filter, or you will desperately need a filter… some professional filter.”
Umberto Eco: A Conversation on Information
(an interview by Patrick Coppock, February, 1995)

SCAN is aiming for a solution of major problems of content organization and findability in information overload era.

SCAN aggregates content from different sources into a single documents collection. This repository may keep records on thousands of documents independently of their original locations and formats. Every document record contains a number of metadata properties (such as title, description, author, creation date, etc) which can be either set automatically or edited manually.

Adding documents to the repository is an automated operation. A user only need to point SCAN to a location and the application will find and add every document from there. Added document locations will be monitored for changes (new, modified or deleted documents) to keep the repository up-to-date.

The documents content is indexed for search and text analysis. You can search the documents either by simple text queries, or by using special forms to make complex queries for searching on document text and properties. The queries can be saved for repeatable use.

The documents collection is structured with a system of tags, similar to the services like del.icio.us or Flickr. Tags are keywords or labels attached to the items to identify them for quick navigation and finding. All tags together form a taxonomy representing the semantics of the documents collection. The taxonomy can be viewed as a “tags cloud” for navigating through the documents repository.

SCAN text analysis mechanism simplifies the process of tagging. It analyzes a document content and suggests the most relevant words as to-be tags. It makes manual tagging as simple as selecting the tags from the proposed candidates. It also can undertake the whole manual process of tagging, either by automated assigning the tags to the documents, or by finding the documents, relevant to a specific tag. Another text analysis application is searching the documents similar to a specific one (search by pattern).

SCAN is a component-based software using a number of plugins for specific features. The basic SCAN platform can be easily extended with plugins for new document formats, document locations (RSS feeds, web-sites, e-mail, etc) and language analyzers. Whole new areas of functionality can be added with user interface extensions. An example of such extensions is the plugin to browse the repository with a calendar (grouping the documents by their creation dates).

SCAN is a Java application, so it works on any Java-enabled platform. SCAN is a free open source software, distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0

See also:

• List of current features
• Download SCAN
• How to obtain SCAN sources from SVN repository
• User’s Manual

We assuming Memoranda is already installed on your Linux system (that is, ZIP archive is unpacked) into, say, “/opt/memoranda” directory. To be sure that the executables have proper permissions, run:

chmod 755 /opt/memoranda/memoranda.sh
chmod 755 /opt/memoranda/lib/kde/systray4jd

Creating a desktop shortcut

1. Right-click anywhere on your desktop, select “Create New->Link to application…” and enter “Memoranda”.
2. Go to “Application” tab and enter into the fields
   Command: /opt/memoranda/memoranda.sh
   Work path: /opt/memoranda
3. Go back to “General” tab and click the icon. In the icon dialog box select “Other icons”, “Browse” and point it to ‘/opt/memoranda/lib/icons/memoranda48×48.png’
4. Press “Ok”

To put new shortcut into KDE panel also, simply drag-n-drop it from the desktop.

Creating a menu item

1. Right click the desktop shortcut created before and select “Copy”
2. Open Konqueror and navigate to “/home/you/.kde/share/applnk” directory. Tip: if Konqueror does not display “.kde” directory, select “Show hidden files” in its “View” menu.
3. Create new subdirectory (say, “Utilites”, “Office” or “PIM”) or go into an existing one. These subdirectories are the sections of your K menu. Right click anywhere in this directory and select “Paste file”.

Done.

A lot of people know about Beryl due to its show-stopper feature – a 3D-dimensional “Desktop cube” where each edge of it is a separate desktop. You can place the windows on separate edges and rotate the cube to change the current desktop. For those who are not on Linux, I should say that multiple desktops is a common practice in Linux desktop environments, and Beryl’s cube is just a metaphor for to visualise that old concept.

What’s good

• Switching between windows using their scaled live previews (like in OS X) is great.

• It is an eye-candy. True transparency and realistic shadows effects make the windows looking awesome.

• It is very customizable. You can spend hours to explore all options and adjust Beryl settings by your taste.
• A rich set of customizable window decoration themes.
• Zooming the screen is amusing and pays for accessibility.

What’s bad

• Beryl didn’t work out of the box with ATI Radeon graphic card. This howto helped to fix the problem.
• Java applications do not display correctly. See the solution.
• I could not find an option to display taskbar icons only for a current desktop, as I used to do in default KDE mode.
• There is a sort of conflict of Beryl and default KDE desktop switcher (“Pager”). It is better to turn it off when using Beryl.

[Upd: Unfortunately, the bad things list is growing]

• Beryl makes SuperKaramba widgets invisible if SuperKaramba is started first. See a trick with autostarting order.
• Beryl prevents the system to awake from Hibernate or Suspend mode. The solution is to kill Beryl before hibernating and to start it automatically on awakening.

[/Upd]
Resume: Install it if you care about the desktop aesthetics or want to amaze your Windows friends.

1. When you are looking for a document on your machine, the following navigation hints are important (specify an order, e.g. “a, d, c, b”):

a. File name
b. File name and folder
c. Date of creation/modification
d. Document metadata properties
e. Full-text search results

2. Do you use document titles (or another semantic data) as the file names?

a. Yes, always
b. For important documents only
c. Don’t care about the file names

3. Do you keep a sort of semantic folder structure for storing your documents?

a. Yes, and I keep all my documents in a single folders hierarchy, organized semantically
b. Yes, but use the structure for important documents only
c. Use random folder structures, depending on a context of my work
d. Don’t care about where I’m saving my files

4. Do you use document shortcuts (Windows) or symbolic links (*nix) for improving navigation?

a. Yes, often
b. Rarely
c. No

5. How often do you use the system full-text search for finding a specific document?

a. This is my everyday way of finding the documents
b. Only when I need to find the document quickly
c. Only when I gave up to find the document by other ways
d. Only when I’m not sure the document on this topic exists
e. Never use the search for this purpose

6. Do you use “advanced search” capabilities?

a. Yes, often
b. Rarely
c. No, basic search is enough

7. Do you use the system “Recent documents” list?

a. Yes, often
b. Rarely
c. No

8. Do you enter the metadata (title, author, subject, keywords etc) in the “Document properties” dialog box of your text editor?

a. Yes, always
b. For important documents only
c. Don’t care about it

9. How do you mark an importance of a document?

a. Place it into a special folder
b. Place it on the desktop
c. Bookmark it (place into the “Favorites”)
d. Do nothing

10. How many documents (in percentage against all documents on your machine) are used actively?
11. How do you handle outdated documents?

a. Keep them in place
b. Move to a special folder
c. Move to backup media, then delete
d. Delete them

12. Which formats you use for the text documents (specify in order of importance, e.g. “a, d, c, b”):

a. MS Word
b. OpenDocument
c. PDF
d. HTML
e. XML or SGML (DocBook etc)
f. Plain text
g. Other

13. Do you save online documents on your local hard drive?

a. Yes, often
b. Save important or very large documents only
c. Never

14. Do you keep a sort of a personal electronic library?

a. Yes
b. No

15. Do you use specialized software for photo albums or multimedia collections management?

a. Yes
b. No, standard system tools are enough

16. How do you estimate efforts on supporting your local document collections?

a. It is a burden, it takes a lot of my time and harms for my work
b. It takes some time but it worths it
c. It is not a problem with help of the modern desktops
d. Do not see any problem

17. Do you use del.icio.us?

a. Yes, for every interesting stuff I meet on the Web
b. Yes, for important links only
c. Yes, for links I want to share with somebody else
d. No

18. How many tags are in your del.icio.us profile?
19. How many del.icio.us tags you usually assign per a single link (in average)?
20. When choosing the del.icio.us tags, you prefer

a. Your own tags
b. Other’s tags, suggested by the service

21. When choosing the del.icio.us tags, you prefer to

a. Reuse the existing tags, as possible
b. Create new tags

22. Do you try to avoid tags synonymity?

a. Yes
b. No, I don’t care about synonyms

23. Do you use tag bundles?

a. Yes
b. No

24. Which factors are important for tags selection (specify in order of importance, e.g. “a, d, c, b”)?

a. My own subjective associations
b. My vision of of the implicit topic semantics (tend to be objective)
c. Explicit textual properties of the document (terms frequency, etc)
d. Tags, assigned by other people

25. The best synonym of the”tag” is:

a. Category
b. Term
c. Topic
d. Keyword
e. Label

26. The purpose of the tags is:

a. Distinction
b. Unification

27. A number of tags per document is a measure of:

a. Document importance
b. Information diversity
c. Collection size
d. Selection quality

28. Would automatical tags generation be useful?

a. Yes, and it could completely replace human brains in this area
b. Yes, but it matters as a help for human brains only
c. No, the tags should belong to humans

Thank you!

I have no idea what is it doing in Windows, but the greatest advantage of this key in KDE is that it does nothing by default. Also, this is a modifier key (like Shift, Ctrl or Alt), so it can be used for setting a lot of custom keyboard shortcuts. While the most of “Ctrl+” and “Alt+” combinations are usually reserved by applications, “Win+” is vacant and ideal for defining various global system shortcuts.

There is my experience of using Win-key combinations:

“Win” is for the windows, I think

The most of shortcuts are related to the windows and desktop management actions:

• Win+Return maximizes a window and Ctrl+Win+Return makes it full-screen.
• Win+Backspace minimizes a window.
• Win+Esc closes a window.
• Win+Space shows desktop (minimizes all windows).
• Win+number (Win+1, Win+2…) switches to the given desktop. Also, Win+Up/Down switches to the previous or next desktop (I use vertical desktop pager).
• Ctrl+Win+number and Ctrl+Win+Up/Down moves active window to the specified desktop.
• Win+Menu shows a list of all windows on all desktops.

AmaroK

Win-key in combination with additional numeric keypad (aka “grey keys”) is used for controlling AmaroK audioplayer.

• Win+GrayInsert is for play/pause.
• Win+GrayPlus and Win+GrayMinus manage sound volume and Win+GrayMultiply mutes volume.
• Win+GrayLeft/Win+GrayRight switches the tracks

Launching the applications

Combinations of the Win-key with alphabetic keys are used for quick launching the most needed applications and utilities. There are lot of them and it makes no sense to enumerate them here – every user has her own list of preferred software.

Win-key is a good thing, whatever a logo is there. Finally, everyone might put a penguin or K-gear sticker on it :-)