Using the PIMO Perspective in PSEW

Start NEPOMUK, press "view-perspective", pick the PIMO perspective.

The window should now look like this:

Browsing through your PIMO

NEPOMUK gives you access to many information sources, and allows you to organize your files using a classification system. The classification system is called your Personal Information Model or short, PIMO. To browse through your model, go to the PIMO Class browser view, and click on the classes shown:

In this view, you can

• use the buttons (above the list) to create new Things or delete them.
• right-click on items to see similar operations you can do.
• create new Pimo Things from folders. Drag the folder from your filesystem view (windows explorer, MacOs? finder) in your Pimo and drop it over the class this folder should have. For example, drag the folder "CID Project" over the class "Project" and it will create a new project in your PIMO. A new instance is created and the folder is assigned to it. This function saves you time when importing your existing knowledge, alternatively you could also create the new thing and afterwards assign it to the folder.

Look on yourself

The first interesting element in your PIMO is you. Go to the class Person and scroll to the entry with your name on it. Click on that entry.

Place yourself

As first annotation, you can say where you are at the moment. Click on the edit button in the right view.

You see now a detailled editor which allows you to relate things to yourself, or describe yourself.

Scroll down to list of different attributes that can be given and find the has location line.

Enter the name of the city (for example Karlsruhe) where you are usually located (where you live). The city will probably not be known to the system yet, so when you enter Karlsruhe, the system will not find this city and show an empty list. A button should appear saying create new, if the button does not appear, press "Escape" after you entered Karlsruhe. Press the create new botton

A box will appear where you can explain what Karlsruhe is. It allows you to set the name of the city and the type. You have to select a location type in the lower half (City, Country, Rooom, etc).

Say that your hometown is a city, express this by entering City in the lower box. It willl show a short list of possible types and select City for you. If not, click on City in the list of search results that is shown after entering City.

Now you have given the information needed by the system to create your hometown - its name and the fact that it is a city. Press create to create the new city and define it as your location.

The system remembers your entered data and shows the created City.

You can go on adding more information about yourself, for example adding topics or the company you work for. Your changes will not be stored until you press save, if you make an error you can press cancel (this will undo all the changes since the last save).

The city you have created is again a thing you can edit, the same way as you have edited the thing representing yourself. In the view on yourself, press on the newly created city to browse to it.

The system now shows the item that was clicked. In our case, the city Karlsruhe is shown. Again, the edit-button will allow editing the thing.

Add a textual description to the city, use the field "description" to do that.

After changing a thing, you need to press save or your changes will not be stored.

Using the Annotate-Field

A better support when entering information is the annotate''' field in the editor. It allows to find existing classes and things in the system and will do an educated guess how they can be related to the edited thing. Going back to the person representing yourself, you can press edit and see the annotate''' field:

Enter the name of another thing that you created before, in this example the organization SAP was created before. Type in SAP and it will find the organization and suggest a relation between you and the organization (when you try it, use the name of an element that exists in your system). After typing, the system will search for possible things.

The results will be shown below the annotate''' field:

Press the accept-button if the suggested relation is correct:

You can see the new relation if you press the reload to see changes button. This will clear the list of search results and update the editor below showing your accepted relations.

If you scroll down now, you will see the new relation:

Creating a new attribute (property)

The system is shipped with a few standard relations:

• has part - is part of
• is related
• has topic - is topic of

These relations can be used to connect things (one thing is related to another, one thing is part of another, etc). If more precise relations are needed, they can be created.

For example: if you want to express the fact that people can know each other, you can define the new relation (or called property) that a person can know another one.

In the editor, scroll down to the button where a field exists called add property. You can search here for existing relations, but it also allows you to create new relations. Type in the new relation name knows, the system will not find an existing relation and suggest you to create a new one, if not, press "escape" after search. Press the create new button.

It is possible to enter a description of the property and to say what possible values of the property are. Search for value types here.

Once all information about the new property is entered, press save:

The new property will be stored in the database (it can from now on be used also for other objects) and the system will use it on the currently edited thing.


Note: For this searchfield we don't allow any of these special characters:

+ - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \

If you want to search for a thing with a label containing one of these characters, just a space instead.

In the example, use the knows relation to relate the current thing with another one. In this case, we relate the thing with another person called Dirk Hageman.

After all these changes, the system has now a better view on you, and you can remember relations of yourself to cities and friends. The same annotations can be added to related things. Clicking on the related person will open this person:

In the view on the related (known) person Dirk, you see a back-link to Claudia, all relations on the semantic desktop are bi-directional. Adding relations will help you find things by relation - once related, you will be able to navigate in both directions.