About Koble

I suppose Koble can be many things, to me it is simply:

Koble is a Semantic Desktop with no desktop component.

I think the general Semantic Web developer would think of it more like a Semantic Wiki. At the end of the day it's hard to define what it is, so lets just look at what it does:

• A personal world model manager, create classes:

  persons, projects, companies, curry-dishes, whatever,...

  
  and things:

  Bob, Nepomuk, IBM, Alu Bhaaji, etc.

• Create a wiki-page for each thing
• Relate things to each other:

  Bob works for IBM, IBM is in Nepomuk.

• Add links to each things:

  Alu Bhaaji => http://www.hookedonheat.com/2006/02/02/simply-irresistable/

• Upload files, and associate the with the things:

  Upload IBMs logo and link with IBM, upload Bob's CV, etc.

History

I made Koble because I really liked having the Semantic Desktop tool Gnowsis to work with, but it had two problems:

• Writing software in Java is a major pain (to me - this is not a general statement - I dont want a flame-war!)
• Writing software for the desktop, writing GUIs, making sure it works on Linux, MacOSX and Windows, working with drag'n'drop, changing file-systems, trying to use less than 1Gb of RAM, etc. is really really hard.
• A use a desktop at work, a laptop when I travel and another desktop at home. I ran one Gnowsis on each, and syncing them was a pain

Luckily, the all three problems have simple solutions:

• Write the software in python - it lets me develop many times quicker!
• Write the software as a webpage - it only has to run on one machine, I have access to many powerful machines, noone cares if it uses 2GB of RAM, and noone cares if the machine has the CPU maxed out. Only one platform to work with (well, when you ignore the world outside of Firefox like me).
• One webpage, one entry point - this means no offline access, but I'm always online anyway.

For some more details on the development of Koble you can have a look at the development Trac.

Acknowledgements

Koble is developed while working for the Project Nepomuk, which of course aims to build a PROPER Semantic Desktop!

At the core Koble is simplified and webified version of Gnowsis. It would never have existed if it wasn't for the years of work I put into Gnowsis!

Finally, Koble is built with a ton of open-source and freely available software, in no particular order:

• First of all: Python!
• RDFLib - for all your python+rdf needs.
• web.py - the anti-framework.
• JavaScript URL(De|En)code from Albionresearch
• MochiKit - makes JavaScript suck less.

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