Egon Willighagen

Desktop searching has become a hot topic (some [earlier
](https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2006/05/26/molecular-indexing-on-kde-and-osx.html)
[blogs
](https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2005/11/07/ubuntu-dapper-will-include-chemistry.html)),
now that years of data accumulated on ones hard disk: PDFs,
OpenOffice.org documents, Latex manuscripts, old Java source code,
digitized music, and a lot of chemical files. Well, on my hard disk that
is. Unlike piles of paper, a computer could search this data, but due to
the size an index is required. What's KDE4 going to offer?

For the [KDE](http://www.kde.org/) desktop
[Kat](http://kat.mandriva.com/) has for more than a year offered this,
and latter
[Kerry](http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=36832) came
along as frontend to \[Beagle(http://beaglewiki.org/Main_Page)\], though
this does not have the nice integration with KDE [kfile
plugins](http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kfile-plugin/t1.html).
Since then, Kat developed has come to a stop (unfortunately), and
attempts to reach the main author
([Roberto](mailto:roberto.cappuccio@gmail.com)) have been unsuccesfull.
Last thing happening was a rewrite of the database backend.

Additionally, [Scott Wheeler proposed
Tenor](http://dot.kde.org/1109163846/) on
[FOSDEM](http://www.fosdem.org/) 2005: *"KDE 4: Beyond Hierarchical
Data, The Desktop as a Searchable Web of Context"*. A semantic desktop;
potentially cool, but I have heard [little from it
lately](http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/72?from=10), except for some
rumours that [Scott has some actual code at
home](http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/klink/2006-April/000133.html).

Now, [Strigi](http://www.vandenoever.info/software/strigi/)
([download](http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=40889)) has
come along, with a fast indexing engine, just the thing where the Kat
developed seemed to have stopped. The design is different from that of
Kat, but it does not seem unlikely that Kat code can be ported. No
support for PDF or OpenOffice.org documents yet, but that's really the
easy part, and kfile is on its way.

Getting back to Tenor, one might wonder how Strigi could implement Tenor
concepts. A simple approach is at least to allow users to tag files,
just like we have become used to with blogs (e.g.
[Technorati.com](http://www.technorati.com/)) and websites (e.g.
[Connotea](http://www.connotea.org/)). This could be easily implemented
using [extended
attributes](http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Extended_attributes)
(xattr), [already used by
Beagle](http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2006/05/molecular-indexing-on-kde-and-osx.html):

:::: {.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge}
::: {.highlight}
``` highlight
# file: home/egonw/1CRN.jpg
user.Tenor.Keywords="crambin"
user.Tenor.Comment="Used in my ontologies presentation."
```
:::
::::

Obviously, this example shows not just these tags, but a user comment
too. The idea, here, is that Strigi mines these attributes in addition
to the file itself, so that search on tags can be done too. BTW, my
argument to use this, instead of putting these things in the Strigi
database itself, is persistence: data and metadata are kept together.
KDE's file properties dialog would be extended with an extra tab that
allows editing these fields.

Strigi itself can be embedded in KDE applications to search specific
information (e.g. search molecular data within
[Kalzium](http://cniehaus.livejournal.com/23010.html) using the
[InChI](http://www.iupac.org/inchi/)), and even in the FileOpen dialog.
We need patches for KDE4 that allows this, soon.

#### References


Desktop searching has become a hot topic (some earlier  blogs ), now that years of data accumulated on ones hard disk: PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents, Latex manuscripts, old Java source code, digitized music, and a lot of chemical files. Well, on my hard disk that is. Unlike piles of paper, a computer could search this data, but due to the size an index is required. What’s KDE4 going to offer?

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

KDE desktop search: Kat, Strigi and Tenor