Re: Beagle's scope

["D Bera" <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi Kevin,

> 1. RDF Store.  I know that the Beagle++ folks had integrated an RDF
> store into their Beagle modifications.  Are there any plans for Beagle
> proper to include an RDF store?  Or does this belong under a separate
> project?  If Beagle will incorporate its own RDF store, should an
> external application (such as Dashboard) be able to add things to
> Beagle's RDF store or should it maintain its own RDF store?

The beagle-rdf-branch in svn has a partial implementation of
overlaying an RDF store on beagle data i.e. to say handle RDF queries
instead of usual BeagleClient queries. The code in the branch handles
all kinds of <subject, predicate, object> queries. What is missing is
to implement a Semweb.Selectable source to add proper RDF flavour to
the process. My RDF knowledge is not enough to finish the rest :(

The above is an experiment to see if beagle could be mimicked as an
RDF store while not designed to be one from ground up. If it works,
then any RDF client will be able to query beagle.

The other part about storing data is tricky. Again beagle was designed
to pull and index information from data, not store data. There is API
to add extra data in beagle (search Joe's blog) like tags or
additional properties. But for serious applications it is much
desirable to have a dedicated store and let beagle index it for you.
There has been on-and-off efforts in writing a separate metadata store
(possibly a simple sqlite table to start with) but none was completed.

> 2. Indexing of web apps data.  Should Beagle index only desktop/local
> data or should it also index data from web apps?  For example, should
> Beagle (using web APIs) index my Google Docs?

I presonally see no problem in beagle pulling out indexable
information from different data sources (local or web). There has been
talks about a backend to index GMail mails. A backend to index/query
google docs would be a worthwhile addition.

- dBera

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user