[clue-tech] KDE4 Anyone?

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 07-30 22:20, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> I haven't tried it yet, as I'm completely happy with 3.5, and some of
> what I've been reading doesn't have me exactly thrilled. Of course, I
> realize that I shouldn't judge KDE4 based on SJVN's bitching, but when I
> follow links from his blog posts over to places such as:
> 
>   http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
> 
> I cringe a bit.
> 
> Maybe I'm just behind the curve. I haven't "bought in" to the whole
> "semantic web" hype, though I do find the use of things such as keywords
> and tagging to be useful. But that sort of stuff isn't exactly bleeding
> edge, and knowledge taxonomies aren't anything new. Yeah, I know (or
> suspect?) that what's supposed to make this all so powerful is using
> whatever the latest web-based P2P, autodiscovery, SOAPY, RESTful,
> muti-linked, ultra-xreffed whatever tools and stuff to tie related things
> together in some way that theoretically makes following chains of
> semantically related data easy. Except that with over a trillion pages on
> the WWW, you just get a whole pile of stuff you aren't interested in that
> people tagged with terms that they think apply. And I'm sure that
> knowledge taxonomies are useful when applied within a controlled scope.

/OT ramble follows  - not really about KDE...

I think the real benefit behind things like the semantic web, if ever
realized properly, would be to get agents off the ground. I was just
jabbering about that the other day at the Clue-Cert meeting. I was sort of
thinking aloud about what it would take, from a client-side app, to create
an intelligent agent.

By this, I mean, in a very simplistic way, and something that could be
realized with tech we have right now. At its most basic, it would be an
embedded web server that you could put on almost any modern device (say,
Jetty) that can be programmed via plugins to Firefox, and/or web interface
to listen events you care about, and it monitors (via semantic web, among
perhaps other tech) those events for changes, and provides a dashboard
report, and/or RSS feeds I can sub to.

Let's say that I posted to Usenet and want to monitor that thread. Or
shipped an item from Amazon via UPS and want to monitor that item as it is
shipped. Or posted to one of the umpteen billion web forums out there, and
also want to monitor changes to it.

For all these various things, I have to take separate steps to see if they
have changed. Not a big deal if there aren't many, but often that's not the
case...RSS feeds have added a lot, but it seems there is another niche
waiting to be filled.

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at comcast.net  
http://sean-leblanc.blogspot.com/
There's no such thing as a "simple little job around the house." 
-Allen's Observation