Re: Re: Unix Power For Desktop...maybe with S-Flux?

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Forwarding old mails to the list, to make them public.

This is about SFlux, a semantic web application to build command lines.

On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 15:16 +0200, Christian Barbato wrote:
> Rodrigo,
> I've looked at your post even if I can't try the code 'till tomorrow.
> 
> But I'd like to clarify something about SFlux.
> 
> In May 2004 I've had the right idea for my thesis. I thought that
> hiding the concept of application to the newbie users could be really
> useful. Sometimes applications are so big and full of features that
> using Photoshop (or even gimp) just to resize an image is such a bad
> thing, most Linux distributions comes with ImageMagick preinstalled
> but no-one use it (especially newbies) cause of it command-line
> sintax. Yes there are many wrappers but you still have to know about
> the existence of ImageMagick. So I thought that adding a dinamic GUI
> to command lines programs could be a good thing.
> My thesis had to be cross-platform so I had to find a universal way to
> expose applications methods. I opted for describing them using
> Semantic Web technologies: RDF and OWL that can be expressed using XML
> documents and that's what I did and this is the most important and
> innovative part of my work (and probably really useful for Atomato,
> much more than the GUI). I created the OWL vocabularies (that you can
> find on S-Flux site) and using those vocabularies you can describe
> what an application can do and how to access to its command line
> arguments. Maybe it can be extended to DBUS methods too but I don't
> know so much about DBUS, I'll have to study it. Originally S-Flux was
> named Sflow and that's why you can find it on vocabularies namespaces.
> Then, one year later, I was still working on my thesis and I've seen
> your post "Unix power for Desktop" and I've wrote you about my work.
> During the work on my thesis Apple announced Automator. Firstly I was
> quite shocked, you know, "they've stolen my idea!". But than I've
> seen that Automator is really different from S-Flux except it's
> pipelining feature. Automator still need that the user know what
> application use to perform an operation, S-Flux choose it for you,
> presenting to the user only the operations applicable to a particular
> mime-type (of course, power users can force the use of a particular
> software, but usually newbies even don't know what an application is).
> 
> So, I think, that what of my work can be useful to Atomato is its
> Semantic Web architecture. IMHO the GUI have to be totally
> reimplemented, maybe this is not true for the Semantic Web engine.
> 
> Have a nice day!
> Christian.
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>