Aim of this project

Semantik (previously Kdissert) is a mindmapping-like tool to help students to produce complicated documents very quickly and efficiently : presentations, dissertations, thesis, reports. While targetted mostly at students, Kdissert can also help teachers, decision maker, engineers and businessmen. Semantik is also available exclusively for Linux and other free operating systems.

Though this application shares some similarities with general-purpose mindmapping tools like Freemind or Vym, the very first goal of Semantik is to create general-purpose documents through the use of mindmaps.

Application behaviour

Ideas are first layed down on a canvas and then associated into a tree. The tree structure is made to help to see how the ideas interact, and then to develop them further (by adding ramifications). An idea is represented by a shape which contains several a summary (visible part), several text fields, and optional pictures or tables.

The tree obtained, or mind-map, is then used to generate documents. The current generators are pdf documents (based on LaTeX: article, book), pdf presentations (based on LaTeX: Beamer, Prosper), text processing files (ODF such as OpenOffice.org Writer, Impress or Koffice), plain text and internet documents (html).

Additional parameters are used to control the document generation through a stylesheet system. The resulting documents can be viewed almost interactively within Semantik or in external applications.

Download

In the spirit of Kdissert, Semantik remains free to use for everyone, it is currently licenced under the QPL (KDE4 libraries are not in use yet)

The latest Semantik snapshot is available here (09-03-2008)

Most Kdissert features are already present (about 80%), and it is already useable for serious work.

Compilation and installation

The following tools are necessary for the runtime:
KDE4
Python ≥ 2.3

The following tools are necessary for the compilation:
KDE4 development package
Python development package ≥ 2.3
The objective caml compilers (ocaml)

Installation is mandatory (data files):
./waf configure
./waf
su -c "./waf install"


Kdissert

Kdissert is now obsolete. On a system stuck with KDE3 and Qt3 Kdissert can still be used, but upgrading to Semantik is recommended. The latest snapshot is v1.0.7 it can be downloaded from here, and there is a Debian package built on Sarge

A good way for trying the kdissert without having to compile
it is by using the program klik:

(not as root)
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
klik://kdissert


Application buttons

You may add the following code to your pages to show your interest in Semantik (others buttons can be found on the kde website):

<a href="http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/semantik.html">
<img src="http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/semantik-logo.png" alt="semantik" border="0" />
</a>