News from OpenPSA Blogs
Aloha and the art of semantic web content
To bring CMS editing to the next level, the IKS project is working on a semantic HTML5 editor. This week we had a hackathon in Helsinki focusing on implementing our ideas with the Aloha Editor. In addition to enjoying the hot summer weather here, we accomplished quite a bit and in the end were able to present the whole pipeline of:
- Loading content from Midgard CMS to Aloha Editor
- Annotating our content with Google-compatible Person RDFa elements
- Saving the content back to Midgard
- ...and finally analysing the content with FISE to find more semantic information
The hackathon participants included developers from Nemein, Gentics, Infigo, Salzburg Research and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Some screenshots:
Editing content with Aloha in Midgard
Annotating persons with the Aloha RDFa plugin
RDFa annotation created with the semantic editor
Additional semantic information suggested by FISE
All the relevant code can be found from GitHub (see also the FISE Midgard integration).
Frankencamera aims to make cameras open and programmable
Frankencamera, or fCam, the open source computational photography platform from Stanford's Camera 2.0 project was unleashed for the Nokia N900 this Wednesday. PhysOrg has a story outlining the significance of this:
Computational photography refers to the ways computers can extend the capabilities of digital imaging by combining multiple photographs taken with different camera settings to create an image that could not be taken in a single shot, or with an ordinary camera.
Some of these new ways of combining images can be done in Photoshop or another such program, but until now they could not be done inside the camera, Levoy said. That's because commercial cameras are closed to development by all but their manufacturers. Frankencamera, on the other hand, brings computational photography directly to the camera, by making the camera a programmable platform.
I installed fCamera and the HDR photo assistant from Maemo extras-devel yesterday, and the results (taking .DNG RAW images, automatically generating HDR pictures) seem quite impressive. Here is a quick example from our office. Sun is shining outside and the office is not lit:
For comparison, here is the same setting with the regular N900 camera application:
It will be interesting to see what developers will come up with, now that all these camera capabilities are available through an open API!
Recent performance improvements for Midgard 8.09
Midgard 8.09 is an industrial CMS that is now in Long-Term Supported stage, with the community maintaining it until 2013. As we all know, performance is a feature, and with a CMS framework that has lived through many changes including transitions from PHP4 to 5.2 and from Classic Midgard era to the modern APIs, there is a lot to do.
For the next 8.09.10 release we decided to put quite a bit of efforts into performance tuning, with some excellent work done by Content Control to simplify ACL handling and cache navigation information. As you can see, the result is quite impressive:
What is left to be done is some work with the multilingual content database queries. After that we should be good to go with what is probably the fastest Midgard1 ever.
Zeitgeist does location: what did I do while in Brussels?
Zeitgeist, the desktop activity logging engine is now becoming geo-aware. From Seif Lotfy's blog:
It allows you to ask Zeitgeist stuff like
- “Get me the recent files I edited at university”
- “Who do I contact most when I am at School?”
- “Which pictures did I take in Brazil?”
- “Where was I when an Email came in?”
- “What files did I open during the conference?”
As I've been advocating since 2006, location is important for making applications smarter. While you might not remember where you stored some file, you probably remember where you were when working on it. Then Zeitgeist's location features, powered by GeoClue, will be able to get it for you.
This is especially cool since Zeitgeist is coming for Maemo as well. My laptop is quite mobile, but the N900 is even more so.
My GeoClue talk from aKademy 2010
aKademy 2010 was hosted in the sunny city of Tampere by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, an organization that I'm a steering group member of. In addition to helping a bit with the arrangements and organizing the Midgard Gathering there, I also gave a talk about GeoClue, the positioning framework for Linux desktops.
We initially started the push for location-aware desktops around 2006, and now the efforts are finally starting to bear fruit. Both Zeitgeist and Nepomuk are looking at indexing documents based on where you accessed them, Telepathy can share your location with your friends, and hopefully soon also your desktop clock will switch timezones when you travel.
It is very cool that this development seems to be happening on both GNOME and KDE at a reasonably similar pace. GeoClue is also a service in MeeGo and I've been told another major mobile phone manufacturer uses it. Maybe soon Mac OS X will not be the only platform with location APIs built in?
Photo by Alexey Zakhlestin.
Meet Midgard and GeoClue in aKademy 2010
We tried to get the combined GUADEC and aKademy conferences to Tampere in 2009, but a warmer place unfortunately won. However, we will be hosting this year's aKademy so at least KDE and Qt fans will get to enjoy this beautiful northern industrial city.
The main conference will be held at the Tampere University over the weekend, and then the remaining hackweek will be in the nice Demola facility in the Finlayson district. Expect great connectivity and close proximity to all Tampere nightlife.
I'm involved with two aKademy activities:
- GeoClue presentation on the location service that can be used on any Linux desktop and is used in MeeGo. I'll also talk about what desktops can do when location is available
- Midgard Gathering during Mon-Wed of the hackweek. Midgard provides a content repository for applications that should be available also for Qt apps through GObject Introspection. With some proven performance benefits and replication support, Midgard should be interesting for any desktop or mobile app that deals with structured data
In addition there will be a Maemo / MeeGo meetup in the Plevna brewery on Friday evening. See you there!
