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Talk Details

Speaker Name	Scott Wheeler
Company	SAP AG
Scope	Technical
Track	Desktop Applications
Talk Title	KDE 4: Beyond Hierarchical Data -- The Desktop as a Searchable Web of Context
Synopsis	Data and its abstractions are constantly becoming increasingly complex. Setting, files, networks layouts and online resources have traditionally been organized into similarly increasingly deep and wide hierarchies. At the same time the growing pervasiveness of computing technology is constantly producing a less technical target audience. At a certain point a threshold is reached -- traditional data hierarchies become incomprehensible to users. This talk suggests one potential approach to dealing with this issue. A number of approaches to mitigate this problem have been attempted with varying degrees of success. Settings databases hidden from "normal" users have been invented to hide less relevant settings, most recently and most often used file lists are commonly employed. However, in the most extreme case of data explosion -- the world wide web -- search (as opposed to the hierarchical data organization of the early web or gopher) has become the de facto method for making sense of this information. In these days of desktop systems with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, millions of files, thousands of desktop settings and local area networks with dozens to thousands of nodes, we are rapidly approaching this threshold in desktop computing. Search serves as a means of simplifying these hierarchies and presenting them organized be relevance and attempts to make this data manegable again. It has been widely successful specifically on the world wide web. Of course in looking towards search based interfaces it's relevant to examine what concepts search is built on in domains where it has been successful -- such as the web. In modern search strategies relevance emerges as a function of context and linkage rather than being solely based on content or other such static information. It naturally makes sense for us to explore how these concepts map onto the desktop and what tools and technology we need to build to provide the most powerful end-user tools. This prompts the idea of inter-desktop linkage, which in turn provides an open field for a good number of additional interesting ideas. Work has begun in KDE on a framework, targeted for inclusion in KDE 4, for desktop linkage on top of which search and other applications can be built. In my talk I'll give some of the details of the conceptual and technical details of this framework and some of the applications that will be possible to build on top of it.
Speaker Profile	Scott Wheeler is a Linux specialist who has been employed in the SAP LinuxLab in Walldorf, Germany since 2002. He has been active in several areas of KDE development in the last several years, most notably multimedia. He is the author of JuK, FlashKard, KSig, TagLib and assorted hacks throughout the rest of KDE.
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