In my first of hopefully many blog posts I like to introduce you to my approach to combine bibliographic data with your files and thoughts via the Nepomuk framework.
Conquirere allows you to add bibliographic data such as journals, books, proceedings papers, articles and many more to Nepomuk. Combine this data with the documents on your harddisk or some online storage and helps you to organize your data to quickly find some parts of your research again.
Why use Nepomuk when the same could be archived via KBibTeX and the good old .bib files? Because we can! Even though KBibTeX does gain file support in its latest versions it will still only operate on the flat database from the .bib files. The same is true for any other bibliographic manager. With the help of Nepomuk we can give our data a semantic meaning.
Connect the publications with the contacts from Akonadi, attach notes to them or mark the article as part of an event from your Akonadi calendar. Group your research papers together without duplicating the data or copying files around on your harddisk and search through your papers and data via Nepomuk to find exactly what you are looking for.
Even if many people seem to dislike Nepomuk, their real problems are within the feeders (which are getting better and better now). The Nepomuk database itself was always working great and very fast.
Nepomuks only problem is the lack of programs making use of the great features offered by this system or better yet, most people don't know that Nepomuk is used in the background by several programs (Searching, tagging adding notes in KDEPim, dolphin or the krunner).
Now there is another program based completely on the idea of this semantic database.
Enough introduction for the moment, now lets see whats working already.
In its current state Conquirere will list all your documents, (pdf, odt etc) as indexed by Nepomuk. Allow you to tag and comment them and tell what kind of publication this file represents. Like you would add data to your usual bibtex file you can add authors, editors, title, publication date and so on.
Because this would be a lot of work, you can also import existing bibliographic data. Thanks to KBibTeX approach to make its functions available for others you can also import any kind of bibliographic data and create the Nepomuk resources from it.
Furthermore, if you want to look for new information search through the several online services and import their data directly. Or use Zotero to add the data while you are surfing for some research papers and import/sync them later on.
Got lost in all your data and can't find the right file with some content you need? Nepomuk offers a great way for full text search and you never have to spend hours opening and reading your pdf files again.
But don't stop with files, connect emails, events or notes together so you have always all the data you need.
Finally all the research is done and you want to start to write and cite. Export your references again. Thanks again to KBibTeX this is as easy as 2 clicks and you can create a .bib file with the references you need. Or pipe the data directly to LyX.
As you can see Conquirere already offers a lot and hopefully one day it will offer a lot more.
If you like to have a look at the current progress, feel free to check it out from playground. Just follow the instructions from the README and you're ready to go.
But please keep in mind: It is in an early state. So expect it to crash and be buggy for now.
Also not all parts are working, especially the zotero sync isn't finished completely. So i wouldn't recommend to use it in a productive environment at the moment.
Enjoy the first preview of Conquirere.
