News from the KDEWin front - Part 2

Following the previous article, there's more exciting news in Windows-land ! In addition to Akonadi, we have another core technology of the KDE Platform (+10points) up and running: Nepomuk

The main task was to adjust to Virtuoso now being the official backend for Soprano, but only a surprisingly small amount of work was needed in order to get the Virtuoso backend to run on Windows. And guess what, it works like a charm, and it's fast. A big thumbs up to the people at OpenLink for providing us with a great open source version of their database.

With both these technologies at hand, there's a lot of potential for things we can achieve, on linux of course but also on Windows. To give you a little teaser, have a look at  the screenshot below :

This is the akonadi console on Windows showing a running agent based on Nepomuk: the contact feeder. This agent scans your resources and automatically extracts all contacts found (based on email addresses, event organizers, address book entries, etc...) and adds them to the Nepomuk storage.

You can then use the convenient querying API of Nepomuk to extract that information and put it back in context. For example, the following screenshot shows the results of searching Akonadi contacts by email address, these contacts having been automatically extracted by the Nepomuk contact feeder agent :

As you can see, the results are Akonadi items, not just strings. (note that for that example we use a SPARQL query, which is the querying language used internally by Nepomuk and Soprano).

Pretty cool huh ? :) This is just one simple example of what we can achieve by combining Akonadi and Nepomuk, and there many many more at hand...

Thanks a lot to Sebastian Trueg, the man behind Nepomuk and Soprano, for his help and cooperation in getting the Virtuoso backend running on windows, and to his employer Mandriva for their support !

So...that's it ! 2009 is out, and it was a good year for KDE in general and KDEWin in particular. Now it's time to go celebrate another great year to come !

Happy New Year everybody, and see some of you in a few weeks at CampKDE in San Diego !

CHEERS !!!