Back when Windows Vista was still known as Windows Longhorn, the operating system contained a very interesting and promising feature, a feature promoted as one of the 'pillars' of Longhorn: WinFS. WinFS was a storage subsystem for Windows, based on a relational database, that could contain whatever data you wanted to put in it. Thanks to the relational properties of the database, you could then create relationships between data, or let the computer do that for you.
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Member since:2006-09-27
Nepomuk integration is one of the most exciting features of KDE4. OTOH I'm worried about implementing semantic attributes at such a high level. I mean, what happens if you log into, say, icewm, or console, instead of KDE, and move or rename a file? Can Nepomuk detect this change correctly the next time you log into KDE? In Windows the problem doesn't arise because there's only one desktop environment, but in GNU/Linux it seems that semantic features should be implemented below any DE, maybe with FUSE. I guess there must be a good answer, because people are actually using KDE4, but I haven't found it.
Member since:2005-07-06
I don't know if the nepomuk developers have addressed this, but one way of doing it in Linux could be to use inotify to trigger some kind of update method in such an event. This would work even at the CLI level.
Member since:2007-02-17
I was wondering that too. Maybe the Gnome team should create their own semantic backend, if they already don;t have one, and work with the KDE team to standardize the protocols so that interaction between both services would be flawless. Better yet fdo can maybe create it a standard for all desktops to use. I'm not a fan of KDE's UI, but the technology can't be denied. Gnome needs to get in the game.
Member since:2007-12-17
Member since:
2005-07-06
Please, people, read the article PROPERLY before spouting NONSENSE. ZFS, Beagle, Spotlight - they're all awesome, but have absolutely NOTHING to do with the technologies behind WinFS or the original WinFS project that led to their creation.
That's true. If you want a semantic desktop in the *nix world, have a look at nepomuk http://nepomuk.kde.org/
As KDE4 will be ported to Windows, MacOS, there is a chance that we will see the the ideas of the original
WinFS come true, regardless what Microsoft decides to do with WinFS in the future.