With this great title stolen from the techbase page, what could possibly go wrong?
Yesterday in Freiburg our meeting to discuss about Nepomuk and integration with social-semantic-collaboration issues kicked of. We, that is Sebastian, Alessandro, Frank, Leo, Stéphane, George, Laura, Iridian and yours truly.
Topics discussed are things like: What meta information would I want to share with my friends, when I pass on photos? What is sent, when I pass on a contact to someone else? Do I want to identify where a rating for a song comes from? Should I be able to search in my music collection for the favorite songs of a friend? What and how is all this technically feasible? What about my privacy and that not so public comment I wrote the other day?
We talked about some use cases, such passing on data on usb sticks, later mailing some of the data and thinking about the life cycle of the meta data. Now we know a lot more about our virtual friend Claudia, her wedding and Dirk’s dislike for her dress 😉
While some of this may sound pretty academic still, we also discussed the practical side of things, how it can be expressed in the Nepomuk onthologies and how to deal with privacy issues. Clearly the others are more into the RDF world than I am, so I’m still playing catch up with all the fancy words and wealth of abbreviations around. But don’t let that scare you, to use Nepomuk as user, you won’t have to deal with all of these. Even as application developer you can use Nepomuk without becoming an expert in semantic issues and onthologies since Nepomuk takes care of most of the work for you 🙂
During breakfast we had a lively discussion about GUI features and how to give more of the power of Nepomuk into user’s hands and where we need more integration.
On the more practical side, Sebastian helped me debug one of the strigi analyzing problems that the virtuoso backend showed on my desktop, within a few hours my Nepomuk database now grew from containing the meta data of about 100 files to over 20000 now :). (Just in case anyone wants to try: get Virtuoso from sourceforge (released version 5.0.12), use “./configure –disable-all-vad”, rebuild soprano and kdebase.)
Currently Frank presents the Open Collaboration Services and we will discuss integration of online data, services and Nepomuk afterwards. Then we’ll try to get some of the data exchange ideas put into code.