S-Flux blog

From GUADEC

2007-07-17T00:07:00.000+02:00

So, finally I'm at GUADEC. I've arrived in Birmingham on sunday and I'll remain here up to Saturday afternoon.
Full of gnomers here at the Hotel and they're still coming. Wednesday I'll give the talk about SFlux, quite excited for that :-)
Stay tuned, more informations in the next days.

A RDF-Store is not a DB

2007-06-07T12:23:00.000+02:00

Few days ago a quick thread about integrating semantic web technologies in GNOME took place in the gnome-devel mailing list.
The main question was if it's planned for GNOME a project like Nepomuk which API is going to be implemented for the KDE desktop-environment.

Apart from the decision if incorporate Nepomuk in GNOME (no decision has been taken), I've noticed that there seems to be a misunderstanding about what is and what can be done with a RDF-Store.
A RDF-Store is not a database; it certainly permits to store RDF triples but it doesn't have to be intended as a way to store informations in a schematic way as we usually do with databases.

Firstly RDF is a model to organize semistructured informations, and, most important, it's possible to create reasoning (via OWL) on top of it, that's a thing that can be hardly done with a classic database. This means that from a pool of data we can get more informations than what we've stored on it.
It's also much easier to integrate different sources of RDF triples together than joining data from different databases.

So, I think, that storing desktop-oriented informations using Semantic Web technologies is a more proper and far-sighted way to organize users data.

Going to GUADEC '07

2007-05-23T12:19:00.000+02:00

So, it seems that my talk proposal has been accepted so this July I'll go to GUADEC.
My talk will take place Wednesday 18th July at 15.00. It's part of a lighting-talks series, 5 min each, covering various aspects of the GNOME environment.
I hope to have a good time during that Birmingham week :)

Who need [to know about] applications?

2007-03-05T21:40:00.000+01:00

Today I was thinking about the new UI for S-Flux trying to focus what were the problems with the old one. Well, it happens that I've thought and created S-Flux because I wanted to hide applications to the user, so why should I have to start S-Flux with a dialog that let you choose an application to open the selected files with?

Probably the first dialog of the next version of S-Flux will be the operations dialog. I still have to figure out how to re-design it...

Ontology Reloaded

2007-01-26T14:38:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned in previous posts one of the things that I'd like to add to S-Flux is the support for D-Bus enhanced applications. To achieve this goal I have to abstract a little more the concept of application that as for now was sticked to command line applications.
Right now the main part of the ontology is structured as showed in the following picture:

What I'm going to add to the ontology is showed by this picture:

Basically I've added the subclasses for Command Line and D-Bus applications and the concept of Operation Invoker which let me abstract the way for invoking operations regardless if the application is a command line tool or a graphical D-Bus enhanced application.

Editor

2007-01-11T14:37:00.000+01:00

Until now I've managed OWL and RDF files using a "simple" editor like Emacs. Everything worked fine even if sometimes it is a little tedious but now I'm facing the problem of generating some graphs of the ontologies and I'm planning a refactoring as well, so I'm looking for a more specialized tool to work with classes, properties and instances.

Probably I've found what I was looking for in the Protégé ontology editor. It seems really powerful even if its interface can result a little scary at first.

Back again

2007-01-03T16:52:00.000+01:00

I haven't worked on my project S-Flux for a long time, mainly because I've changed city and job. Now I'm living in Trieste and working as a consultant at Insiel s.p.a.

There's a lot to do to improve S-Flux, probably I'll have to totally rewrite it. I think I'll concentrate in deeply integrate it with the Gnome Desktop Environment and probably with Maemo and OLPC too abandoning the Mac and Windows port.
To better couple it with Gnome I'm planning to use the new-born Atomato library integrating it with DBus support.

Many things to do, too few time to work on...well I'll try to do of my best.

Stay tuned for more.