Olav, Thanks for your reply. I figured that people had read enough shiny use cases, so I tried to keep those to a minimum, but sure.
Let's say you use Evolution's address book to manage all your contacts and you just bought a new smartphone which only supports a proprietary address book format. You want to move your contacts to the new phone - what do you do? Conduit has knowledge of which format is used by the phone, but has no way to convert the data. Today, chances are that you will have to do something like exporting the Evolution address book to the .vcf (vCard) format and then searching for and downloading an application which is able to convert from .vcf to the proprietary format and then finally move over the converted file to the phone. Most likely, coming up with the steps involved in this task is either too complex or too boring for many users. Now let's say that Evolution store its address book in the NEPOMUK Contact Ontology (NCO) format in a central RDF repository and your new phone support the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) format. You do a query for your Evolution contacts in Conduit and request them to be moved to the phone. Conduit (or a lower level component) detects that the source and destination formats differ, automatically search the Web for a matching ontology alignment, map the NCO contacts into FOAF and move them to the phone. RDF can automate many such processes, but a few components would be required (or at least be very handy) at the system level such as a central RDF repository and an ontology mapping service. Another idea I personally find interesting is that of semantic user interfaces, somewhat as proposed at: http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/vis/vis-paper/ (this particular paper was written without RDF in mind, but the idea is the same) Instead of having applications defining exact sizes and positions of a set of widgets, the application express what type of input and output it needs using an RDF vocabulary for user interfaces. A system component then transforms the RDF description into user interface, perhaps according to a personalized style or a particular access method. For instance, the UI semantics may be transformed into HTML and presented as a form to the user on his mobile phone. This isn't really possible with standard GTK, because information (semantics) is hardcoded into the exact positioning and dimensioning of the widgets by the programmer. This information might be lost on a screen with different proportions or an output device without proportions at all (screen-readers etc.). lør, 14 06 2008 kl. 19:54 +0200, skrev Olav Vitters: > Could you turn this into at least one concrete example? I don't > understand what you're proposing aside from 'use RDF everywhere'. -- Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
