Back in 2009 Alessandro Sivieri worked on a GSoC project to create a new way of saving and opening files – the semantic way. Sadly we never finished his work by integrating it into Nepomuk properly. I, however, still think that his approach was sound. The problems back then were some missing features, performance, and a rough GUI.

I thought about trying it again for a long while, mostly because I simply want semantic saving. Today I finally sat down and created a mockup of the Smart Save Dialog 2.0. Here goes:

The idea is simple: instead of choosing the folder you want to save in (yeah, yeah, there is still the possibility to select the folder anyway) you define information and relations around the document. This includes an optional title and description (could be pre-filled by the application in the future), a document type (Here a type is neither a mime-type like pdf or an NFO type like nfo:PaginatedTextDocument but rather a real-world type like contract, invoice, paper, thesis, and so on. The idea is to let the user define new types and maybe even share those types with others.), and a set of additional annotations. The latter can be anything, starting with simple relations to projects or people but can also be literal properties (this is where I aim to revive my nepomukannotation framework by solving its performance issues).

Anyway, I created the mockup and did not want to let it go to waste. Thus, I blog about it. Maybe some of you have ideas on how to improve the dialog. But please no questions about how to disable Nepomuk or how you do not want such a feature!