Re: New to Beagle

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Sat, 2005-11-19 at 21:38 +0100, Alberto Mardegan wrote:
> The feature of eligante that I care most is the possibility of
> associating all the identities a user might have (I am 4469906 in ICQ,
> mardy78 in skype, "Alberto Mardegan" in emails...) into a single one,
> and in this way it's possible to see in a unified style all the
> conversations you had with this user, independently from where they took
> place (Gaim ICQ, Gaim, Yahoo, e-mail...). Indeed, these can be sorted by
> date, so you can actually follow the conversations as they happened.

Dashboard (http://nat.org/dashboard), which was the precursor to Beagle,
did this as well.  Beagle has some very rudimentary support for this
when it benefits the user interface, but it's not sophisticated or
integrated into the engine.

The plan is/was to use the rich metadata that Beagle indexes to create
an RDF graph that would allow us to do this sort of interesting
infomration collation.  It might be a good programming project for
someone to resurrect Dashboard to test some of these ideas out.

> As my first impression, I would say that they both can index e-mails
> and chat conversations, but there are not many other common features.
> Beagle is somehow more filesystem oriented (please correct me if I'm
> wrong), and it can index files on the fly, as they are created (does it
> make use of some advanced capability in the FS?), while eligante is just
> meant for messages, and retrieves its informations upon the execution of
> a command.

I wouldn't say this is 100% accurate.  Beagle has been designed to be
able to use a variety of sources other than files.  For example, we
query the Evolution Data Server without touching any of its files.
There are also experimental Bugzilla and Google drivers for getting
results from a remote server.

There are all kinds of interesting opportunities for this kind of
association of data... it's one of the main reasons why we started
Beagle in the first place.  While we've been mostly focusing on creating
a search infrastructure, we're at a point now with Beagle's maturity
that it can really be applied in these ways.

Joe