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."

Comments

As a KDE 4 user...

[orkybash]

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.

Re:Care to explain?

[orkybash]

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. ;)

Re:Care to explain?

[mcgrew]

I'm dubious

I have yet to see "semantic web" fully explained, but Wikipedia is giving some good insight 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.

Re:I doubt it will catch on...

[contra_mundi]

Try http://nepomuk.kde.org/

Re:I doubt it will catch on...

[leobard]

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

Re:Care to explain?

[Chelloveck]

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 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.

[Balinares]

> ... 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 how it works.