Zeitgeist was invited to give a presentation in the context of Mandrivas organized conference titled “Envisioning the open semantic desktop of the future” at the Open World Forum 2009 in Paris. We had the honor of presenting with big names in the semantic desktop field such as Prof. Stefan Decker of Nepomuk Fame as well as Sebastian Trüg of Nepomuk KDE fame.
It was pretty awesome to share the presentation with them. Alex Gabriel and me took the liberty to present the Zeitgeist Project and especially the Zeitgeist Framework. The feedback was awesome. The audience kinda understood our message of providing new kinds of search queries to the Desktop by using the users activity history. One thing that impacted them the most was the contextual relevancy Alex and I were working on as well as being able to ask for most used documents etc (which as far as I recall does not exist on the modern desktop yet). A lot of people downloaded the code to afterwards and were very satisfied with its “simplicity and organization” THANK YOU Siegfried, Markus and Mikkel for making that happen you guys rock. It was funny when asked how we finance the project, which academic institutes or organization are behind us. Basically NONE. It shows that non-academics can also contribute highly to the semantic desktop.
KDE and Nepomuk are interested in working with us and alot of organizational stuff will happen from my side later to make things happen such as Tracker (0.7 is awesome) integration with the guys from Codethink and Ontology definition with Nepomuk and the KDE. But for now I need to take time to work on the 0.3 release of the Zeitgeist engine and “Teamgeist” with the AWESOME guys from Collabora (MERCI Rob, Youness and Sumana).
Some of the Zeitgeist developers will head to Freiburg to a KDE sprint before the Zeitgeist hackfest (9 -13 November), to integrate Zeitgeist into KDE for their 4.4 or 4.5 release.
All in all this was just awesome the conferences were very very insightful and inspirational. Here are the slides we used i our presentation. Take a look at slides 14-18 since they show some of our usecases. Slide 15 shows how we detect context relevancy by monitoring the focus and slide 17 is Jason Smiths awesome work on Docky using zeitgeist to display”most used documents form the last week that are of mimetypes supported by the application clicked”.
Got to go find food now! Cheers