[SOLVED] Nepomuk File Indexing Service Not Running

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 26 December 2011 12:23:17 T.C. Hollingsworth wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Can it be used in conjunction
> > with some OCR software to index scanned handwriting in jpeg files?
> 
> I'm not aware of any OCR software that handles handwriting very well,
> nor would I want it to start randomly OCRing every JPEG I own.  I
> don't think there's anything stopping someone from writing an app that
> OCRs documents and populating Nepomuk with the text, if someone finds
> that useful.

Just as a side remark... I wouldn't OCR *every* jpeg I own, but I *do* have a 
bunch of them under one particular directory structure, that are basically my 
own scanned handwritings (cca 3000 pages). The files are named file001.jpeg, 
file002.jpeg, etc., so it's essentially a hard guesswork to find the one I need 
to read (and their thumbnails all look the same :-( )... Also, I've seen some 
rather nifty OCR capabilities in recent touchscreen-tablet-computers, where 
you could handwrite on the screen and they would automatically OCR and convert 
it into TeX, complete with mathematical equations that you wrote down (I could 
only wish for something like that in Fedora!)...

My jpeg's are swarming with precisely such math stuff, so I guess it could be 
useful to have all that OCR'd and indexed automatically... ;-)

> > I'd really like to see a real-world example of all this being useful.
> > Otherwise it appears like a solution looking for a problem.
> 
> Part of the problem is that it has some dumb defaults.  For instance,
> it only searches the Documents, Music, Movies, etc. folders that I
> rarely use.  I always configure it to search my entire home directory.
>  Another thing that annoys me is that KRunner doesn't do desktop
> search by default.  Once that's enabled, KRunner becomes *a lot* more
> useful (e.g. more than just slightly faster than launching something
> on a terminal ;-).
> 
> Instead of manually browsing to a directory and opening a particular
> file, I just press ALT+F2, enter the first few characters, and hit
> Enter.  I can search for artists in my music, pictures of my
> boyfriend, functions in source code, and start programs all in one
> text box.

Ok, this sounds reasonable --- to have a system-wide content search facility, 
similar to what Google does Internet-wide. Although I doubt I would use such 
features myself --- I have a rather well-disciplined directory structure under 
~, so I typically know where to look for what. And I am a bit weary of the 
overhead of maintaining the index database for a large quantity of files, on a 
moderate desktop/laptop machine.

But I guess it does make sense for some (most?) people. I've witnessed in 
recent times that people find it easier to fire up Google and search for the, 
say, Fedora Project home page, than to keep a bookmark for it. Even when they 
need to access the site repeatedly. ;-) So if someone is more used to "search-
for-stuff" paradigm than to "keep-stuff-in-well-organized-places" paradigm, 
strigi&nepomuk might be a blessing... ;-)

Speaking of search-paradigms, I've also seen one person opening Google to find 
the home page of YouTube, than doing a search in YouTube for whatever he 
wanted... Looked kind of silly to me, but I guess Google has had a major 
influence lately on the ordinary people's workflow... ;-)

Anyway, thanks for the explanations!

Best, :-)
Marko