Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) support in Strigi

Last week I have been hacking on a Strigi plugin for FOAF files. Now, one will not expect FOAF files on ones desktop soon... unless, you start indexing your Konqueror history. I have not seen that feature yet, but not overly difficult to implement for a skilled Konqueror developer (just use the dbus interface for Strigi).

However, HTML files may have this line in the <head> element:

<link href='http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/people/egonw/foaf.xrdf'
rel='meta' title='FOAF' type='application/rdf+xml'/>

This could be the trigger for a Strigi plugin, to download this file and provide that as substream for the HTML file. I am aware for security issues at immediately pop up, but that is something we can surely deal with.

Using this approach the whole semantic desktop takes shape. Say, I am searching what I have on my desktop on some topic, then, additionally, Strigi will make me aware that I recently read the blog from someone who showed interest in that topic too. Moreover, it will even allow Strigi to tell me which projects on SourceForge are related to this topic.

Far fetched? No, it's really just around the corner. If interested, you may find the source code in KDE SVN under trunk/playground/utils/strigi-foaf. The Konqueror history hack is not implemented yet, as I need to know first what efforts are ongoing in that respect.

Chemical KDE GSoC Project Ideas

Very likely KDE will participate again in the Google Summer of Code. At this moment two project ideas are written up related to chemistry:

• A 3D Molecular Editor
• Strigi: chemistry and biology support

The second is my personal favorite, and I have worked on this topic in the past myself. See also Carsten's post on this.

The only thing I really miss in the full list of ideas, is the idea of completing a Greasemonkey plugin for Konqueror. I could not mentor a project like this, and, therefore, cannot put it up on the idea list :(