At ESWC I was getting a bit frustrated, because I saw many cool new technologies, projects, people and things, but my Gnowsis was broken so I had nowhere to write it down. Really this should of course have been a job for Nepomuk, but the Nepomuk prototype is not yet at a stage where I feel comfortable trusting my data to it :)
So, with plenty of hacking time on the train and while listening to talk at ESWC I started hacking something to keep track of my world. A few things were clear about my new hackish solution:
- It would be written in Python :)
- It would be a web-app, for two reasons:
- I never liked having Gnowsis being only local, I change computers often and want to take the data with me.
- Developing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript is so much easier than any GUI toolkit.
- Web-app meant I could forget a few things:
- No Aperture (local file integration) :(
- No application plugins :(
- BUT I also gained:
- No cross-platform trouble
- I could use Linux Commandline tools, like pdftotext or imagemagick
- I would concentrate on a few features and do them quickly and then leave it alone forever.
When I got home I had some basic functionality ready, and I tried hard to put the thing away to concentrate on my PhD, but it kept coming back. Now, a month and a bit later it's at a stage where I can show it to the world. So! I give you:
Since pictures speak louder than words here are a couple of screenshots (click for larger view):
The Koble welcome screen:
A Thing page:
Adding a relation:
Placing Things on the map:
Even louder than pictures speaks action though, and
Koble is open and you can try it today! Registration requires at least an OpenID account, but preferably a FOAF account linking to your OpenID. Read a bit more about Koble here, or about the FOAF+OpenID accounts.
It is still a bit buggy, and probably always will be. As a guide I have been using it for the past week, and I do trust my data to it :)
PS: Oh, and I just realised it's not quite clear, the URL is http://koble.net :)
PSS: It's of course open-source, you can look at the mess that is the source-code here: http://koble.opendfki.de/ and look at some tickets for some planned features here: http://koble.opendfki.de/report/9