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".

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!

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).

The PIMOShell is a metadata maintenance and debugging tool which I will now use to give a glimpse of the "big picture".

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

So please check it out and especially take a look at the beefed up documentation section: I wrote a bunch of new tutorials for techbase.

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.

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.