Nepomuk – What Comes Next – Revised

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüg on Dec 6, 2011

Finding Duplicate Images Made Easy

It is a typical problem: we downloaded images from a camera, maybe did not delete them from the camera instantly, then downloaded the same images again next time, maybe created an album by copying images into sub-folders (without Nepomuk Digikam can only do so much , and so on. Essentially there are a lot of duplicate photos lying around.

But never fear. Just let Nepomuk index all of them and then gather all the duplicates via:

See bottom link for code

Quick explanation: the query does select all nexif:Photo resources which have the same hash value but are not the same. This of course can be tweaked by adding something like

See bottom link for code

to make sure that we only catch the ones that we downloaded more than once. Or we add

See bottom link for code .

to ensure that the photo was actually taken at the same time – although I suppose the probability that two different photos have the same hash value is rather small.

Maybe one last little detail. In theory it would be more correct to do the following:

See bottom link for code

However, with the introduction of the  Data Management Service in KDE 4.7   similar hash resources are merged into one. Thus, the slightly simpler query above. Still, to be sure to also properly handle pre-KDE-4.7 data the above addition might be prudent.

Of course this should be hidden in some application which does the work for you. The point is that Nepomuk has a lot of power that only reveals itself at second glance.

Link to blog and code

[demilord]

Speaking of the devil, it hasnt ever crashed on me and today, I had the first crash of nepomuk in 4  or 5 months in pclinuxos  .
I take it lightly.. I just find the tagging and quick search and I dont have any complaints about speed or so..  Might be coincidence

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüg on Dec 7, 2011

Symbolic Links in Nepomuk – A Solution

Until now symbolic links were not handled in Nepomuk. Today I commited the last patch for the new symlink support in Nepomuk. The solution I chose is not the theoretically perfect one. That would have taken way to much effort while introducing all kinds of possible bugs, regressions, API incompatibilities, and so on. But the solution is nice and clean and simple.

Essentially each direct symlink is indexed as a separate file using the content of its target file. (This is necessary since a direct symlink might have a different file name than the target file.) The interesting part are the indirect symlinks. Indirect symlinks are files in a folder which is a symlink to another folder. An example:

/home/trueg/
|-- subdir/
   |-- thefile.txt
|-- link/ -> subdir1/
   |-- thefile.txt

Here I have a folder “subdir” which contains a file “thefile.txt”. The folder “link” is a direct symlink to “subdir” whereas “link/thefile.txt” is an indirect symlink to “subdir/thefile.txt”.

Indirect symlinks are simply stored as alternative URLs on the target file resources using the kext:altUrl property. (The property is not defined in NIE since it is not theoretically sound with respect to the design of NIE. It needs to be considered a beautiful hack.)

The only situation in which the alternative URLs are actually needed is when searching in a specific folder. Imagine searching in “/home/trueg/link” only. Since there are no nie:url values which match that prefix we need to search the kext:altUrls, too.

The result of all this is that nearly no additional space is required except for the kext:altUrl properties, files are not indexed more than once, and files in symlinked folders are found in addition to “normal” files.

In my tests everything seems to work nicely but I urge you to test the nepomuk/symlinkHandling branches in kdelibs and kde-runtime and report any problems back to me. The more testing I get the quicker I can merge both into KDE 4.8.

Link/

[Archie]

Speaking of the devil, it hasnt ever crashed on me and today, I had the first crash of nepomuk in 4  or 5 months in pclinuxos  .
I take it lightly.. I just find the tagging and quick search and I dont have any complaints about speed or so..  Might be coincidence

I try to like Nepomuk ... I really do ... but it has given me more annoyances than its worth. Crashes! I would have about half-a-dozen crashes regarding its PID. Easy thing, really. I would just restart the daemon and close the error window. I just hope that when PCLOS moves to either 4.7 or 4.8, Nepomuk on my system will be better.

[rubentje1991]

First quarter of 2012, we probably get the latest (stable) version of KDE
=> when Texstar finds time and a rock stable KDE-release, I'll try Nepomuk/Strigi/.... again 

[menotu]

Yes, it must be frustrating when it not only doesn't work but crashes as well.

I must say though I wished more devs would follow Sebastian Trüg's lead and post/blog regular updates about bugs/fixes and new functionality that may be coming along.

I think devs are more likely to keep/get (more) users "on their side" if they see that they are working on fixes things and not just trying to implement further functions (which would be pointless if it's not working for those users anyway)

===============

Edit:

Also see here  for post by another KDE Dev re KMail

[Archie]

Yes, it must be frustrating when it not only doesn't work but crashes as well.

I must say though I wished more devs would follow Sebastian Trüg's lead and post/blog regular updates about bugs/fixes and new functionality that may be coming along.

I think devs are more likely to keep/get (more) users "on their side" if they see that they are working on fixes things and not just trying to implement further functions (which would be pointless if it's not working for those users anyway)

===============

Edit:

Also see here  for post by another KDE Dev re KMail

+1

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüg on Jan 28, 2012  (trueg.wordpress)

Something Way Less Dry: TV Shows

After my rather boring blog about change notifications I will now to write about something that I wanted every since I started developing Nepomuk. But only now has Nepomuk reached a point where it provides all the necessary pieces. I am talking about TV Show management – obviously I mean the rips from the DVD boxes I own.

So what about it? Well, I wrote a little tool called nepomuktvnamer (inspired by the great python tool tvnamer) which works a bit like our nepomukindexer except that it does not extract meta-data from the file but tries to fetch information about TV Shows from thetvdb.com. You can run the tool on a single file or recursively on a whole directory. It will then use a set of regular expressions (based on the ones from tvnamer)  to analyze the file names and extract the show title, season and episode numbers.



It will then save that information into Nepomuk through our powerful Data Management API. The code looks a bit as follows ignoring code to store actors, banners and the like.

See full article for code

(This code uses my very own LibTvdb which is essentially a Qt’ish wrapper around the thetvdb.org API.)

The result of this can be seen in Dolphin:



Here we see the actors, the series, the synopsis and so on. Clicking on an actor will bring up all they played in, clicking on the series will bring up all the episodes from that series, and so on.

Now let us have a look at the series itself using my beefed up version of the Nepomuk KIO slave:




Full article here

[menotu]

by Vishesh Handa - Tuesday, 31 January, 2012

Nepomuk Tag Manager

Welcome to Nepomuk Tag Week. Well, not really, since it's not an official thing. I've just been working a lot with tags lately, and this week I'm going to be spamming you with some tag related updates (One for every day of the week, minus Monday)

I thought I'll start with something small - Tag Management.



Sweet and simple

We've been badly needing a UI to allow the users to modify, merge and delete their tags. You could always delete this using the conventional "Add Tag" dialog, but this way you can do batch deletes.

I'm not much of a UI designer so the interface is quite bare. I'm hoping that someone can come up with a beautiful mockup, which I can then implement.


Link inc. Source code link

[rubentje1991]

Same link:

Update -

I've added a Filter bar, merged the "Rename Tag" and "Merge Tags" button, and
double clicking on a tag now opens it in the file browser.

[menotu]

A tad more from same site  -  http://vhanda.in/blog/2012/02/a-better-tagging-widget/

There is a lot of code in Nepomuk. However most of it is backend stuff which does absolutely marvelous things behind the scenes - Auto duplicate merging, type checking with respect to the ontologies, caching and lots more. We, however, lack good UIs.

So, if you're a UI designer looking for a challenge, look at Nepomuk. We have a lot of data.

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüeg on Feb 6, 2012  (trueg.wordpress)

More Fun With TV Shows

After fetching all the details about TV Shows from thetvdb.com I went back to my favorite way of browsing things: KIO slaves. So without further ado let me introduce the tvshow:/ KIO slave:



Full article/

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüeg on Feb 11, 2012  (trueg.wordpress)

A Fun Release: Nepomuk TV Namer 0.2

As requested I prepared a release of the  TV Show managing thingi   I implemented. You can download it from download.kde.org mirrors at unstable/nepomuk/nepomuktvnamer-0.2.0.tar.bz2.

The nepomuktvnamer 0.2.0 is a little more polished than the original version and comes with a nice service menu extension allowing to manually start the fetching of TV Show information on folders or video files. This is important since the service does only react on new videos. So you need to start the initial information fetching manually on your TV Show folder.



The tvnamer has two requirements in addition to the typical KDE ones:

    LibTVDb – LibTvdb is a Qt-based library which provides asynchronous access to TV series information from thetvdb.com via a very simple interface. Its use in the Nepomuk TV namer should be obvious.

    Shared-Desktop-Ontologies 0.9.0 – The recently released new version of SDO provides the required nfo:depiction property used by the tvnamer to store banners.

I also recommend to apply the kdelibs patch I mentioned earlier to actually see the TV Show banners. Have fun with it – maybe someone will even package it.

http://trueg.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/a-fun-release-nepomuk-tv-namer-0-2/

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüeg on Feb 10, 2012  (trueg.wordpress)

Just For The Fun Of It: Browsing Music With Nepomuk

Since implementing the TV Show KIO slave was that easy I decided I could do the same for music – just to show how simple it can be. There a a few more lines but that is only because I added browsing by album, artist, and genre. So there are a lot of if/else constructs.

http://trueg.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/just-for-the-fun-of-it-browsing-music-with-nepomuk/

[menotu]

By Sebastian Trüeg on March 5, 2012  (trueg.wordpress)

Something Like Goodbye   

The search for continuous Nepomuk sponsorship has been going on a while now, the fundraiser I ran to help me with that was very successful. I can not thank everyone involved enough. Sadly I was not that successful in securing the funding. This essentially  means that I will not continue to work on Nepomuk as my day-to-day job.

.............

Now what does that mean for Nepomuk? Besides the fact that Nepomuk has some other great developers who will hopefully keep up their good work, I will stay as the maintainer of the core components – at least for the time being. At this point I am unable to say how much I will be involved in Nepomuk in the next years. But seeing that the project means a lot to me I am sure that I will manage to find some time every now and then.

So, this is not really a goodbye. But something like it…

https://trueg.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/something-like-goodbye/