Re: SoC ideas

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 15:36 +0200, Max wrote:
> One idea has been including some of the information about packages
> available in package managers like apt into beagle. This would probably
> be a query backend interfacing to things like apt-cache search. This
> idea mainly came up because packages are one of the frequent things i'm
> searching for. What do you think? Are there any plans to do that / has
> it been done? Are there reasons not to do it?

There is some work to index package files on disk, but there hasn't been
any real work on indexing the data out of the package manager databases.
That's probably worth doing; it's certainly one of the early ideas we
had with Beagle.  (Jon and I both having previously worked on the Red
Carpet package management tool.)

> In the long term perspective there is also tons of meta data available
> in apt and dpkg - especially telling you what package a certain file
> belongs to and so on. This might be very interesting if one wants to
> develope a system of contextual navigation like proposed by the tenor
> project (http://dot.kde.org/1113428593/)

A tool like this is something we've always wanted to write for Beagle.
We called it the Association Browser.

> So i thought about extending leaftag but it looks like beagle already
> has quite a good support for metadata. So maybe enabling browsing and
> refining of searches with metadata in beagle might be a way to go. 

This is a key aspect of how Dashboard worked.  We called the idea
"cluechaining", but it was essentially an RDF graph.  We would do a
search across various backends, and the clues returned would in turn be
used to search further.  So, in this way, you could match an IM name to
an addressbook card, and then use that card to match against emails.

> I think this might be a step to a different way of browsing data.
> Is this something you could imagine to happen in beagle or do you rather
> want to focus on doing search right and leave browsing etc. to projects
> like tenor?

I'm pretty happy with what we've accomplished with search, but now I am
more interested in building interesting applications with it.  So yeah,
I am all for building tools like this. :)

Joe