Mandriva Smart Desktop 2010: links, links, links...
Mandriva Smart Desktop 2010: links, links, links...
The Mandriva Smart Desktop 2010 puts into practice for the first time the Nepomuk technology, resulting from the Nepomuk European project (2006-2009). This means several benefits and productivity gains when dealing with your personal information:
- first, like on the Web, links become first class citizens, letting you relate any and all information artifact on your desktop or on the Web;
- second, you can manage your tasks transversely across the applications (Konqueror, KMail and Dolpin for now);
- third, you can browse your files by their relations with other data, not only by folders anymore;
- last, the desktop speeds up the creation of links between information items by detecting relevant relations and by suggesting them to you while you read.
Links at the centre of the desktop's organization
We all have millions of links in our head which associate together people, events, ideas, memories, projects, etc. Strangely enough, while the Web information sphere hinges on the key concept of hyperlinks since a long time, the personal computer has not much evolved since its inception with the way it helps us to use and evolve our mental links. The Mandriva Smart Desktop rethinks the desktop metaphor by putting links at the centre of our interaction with computers, data and applications. It allows to link data across the applications, to link desktop data with the Web, and in the near future, to link data collaboratively across the desktops.
Xerox Star UI in 1981, pioneer of the personal computers graphic user interfaces - focusing on files, folders and applications - while the Mandriva Smart Desktop puts links at the core
The Mandriva Smart Desktop puts the nature of the data at the forefront (for instance a contract, an invoice, a map, a recipe, a holiday photo etc.) and the relations across the data (contract relating to this project, picture related to ...). Files, folders and applications remain important but they are relegated to the background. This way, the organization of the data can converge to a common structure shared across the applications and the data types.
At the magnitude of thousands of information objects that we manipulate daily in our professional or personal activities, the change brought by the Mandriva Smart Desktop is likely to mean significant time saving, and probably also creativity gains in the sense that the gigantic graph of links that we grow every day is propitious for the emergence of new ideas and new connections. From this point of view, the Mandriva Smart Desktop turns the desktop into a cognitive assistant.
Manage your tasks transversely
In the Mandriva Smart Desktop 2010 edition, Mandriva chose to focus on the management of tasks, and to show how applications can be re-framed around this universal concept. The desktop has been enhanced for making it easy to activate key operations linked to task management: the creation of tasks, the linking of data with tasks and the browsing of tasks. Tasks can be created directly from the taskbar through a dedicated widget titled "Task management widget". Imagine you are looking for an apartment for sale in Paris. You can start by creating a task "Paris apartment project".
The task management widget in the desktop taskbar
Then, you can link data to your project directly from the following applications: Dolphin, Konqueror or KMail. From KMail as from Konqueror, a button lets you create a link between a Web page or an email and the current task. In addition, relevant links are suggested contextually for facilitating the annotation of contents, and for enhancing your personal database.
Creation of a link between an email and your real estate project, and automatic suggestion of annotations
The browsing of tasks and of the related data can then be done either from the Dolphin file manager, or from a dedicated task manager, which can be launched from the widget introduced before:
Browsing all resources linked to your project from Dolphin: files, contacts, emails, Web pages
A synoptic view of the data related to the task « Paris apartment project »: data of various natures are presented in a uniform manner
The task manager displays a hierarchy of existing tasks and presents of each task the emails, the contacts, the Web pages and the files that are linked with it. It also makes it possible to draw new links.
Visualization and editing of the resources related to your project from the task manager
Browse your data by type or relation
The Mandriva Smart Desktop turns the whole computer data into a large database, which is built progressively, without the need to isolate the data that you wish to classify in a dedicated database management system: the data stays where it is and it is completed by a network of links which facilitates the information browsing and the search activities. In the case of a journalist who deals with thousands of pictures on various topics, annotating pictures with the event they relate to, the event context, the persons it portraits etc. will dramatically ease the future search for appropriate pictures illustrating an article.
Metadata addition when saving a photo
The file dialog of the Mandriva Smart Desktop illustrates the possibility to navigate across the files by their type or their relations: filters can be applied for refining the search to specific projects, tasks, last modification date, file author, etc.
Semantic file dialog, complementary to the traditional folder view
Initially, the Mandriva Smart Desktop contains general concepts such as the following ones: project, activity, contact, company, meeting, etc. You can extend the initial set of concepts and relations by defining new ones which cover more specifically your professional or personal activities. In the case of a real estate project, you can for instance introduce the following information types: Apartment, Real estate agency, City district etc. This will let you organize as accurately as possible the data that you gather during your research, hence to retrieve relevant information more easily when needed.
The Mandriva Smart Desktop data manager
Get assistance of the computer for creating links
In order to speed up the creation of links across your data, the Mandriva Smart Desktop includes tools which detect relevant entities and links in text or images. Natural language processing tools resulting from the Scribo research project have been introduced into Mandriva indeed. They suggest contextually relations between recognized entities, for instance between a company, a person and an event mentioned in an email. You can experiment with the feature in KMail for instance, by installing the KMail-Nepomuk application, a KMail version enhanced with text analysis capabilities (package kmail-nepomuk). The Olena library also makes it possible to detect such relations in images. You can experiment with it by annotating images containing names of entities existing in your personal database.
Next steps
The Mandriva Smart Desktop 2010 gives a first insight into the changes that semantic technologies are bringing to the desktop and to the Web. The 2010 decade will bring to the forefront many other innovations related to semantic technologies, changing the way we deal with knowledge at the individual or at the group level. Are you ready to ride the semantic wave? Give a try to Mandriva 2010!
Links
