Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Martin Soto <soto informatik uni-kl de>]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 23:26 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
...
> I think that the idea Ross is trying to get across here is that rather
> than having a flat namespace of metadata types, you want to have
> relationships between the metadata types (metadata about metadata).
> 
> For example, we might have a have a relationship that says that "ross
> performed song.ogg" is a specialised version of "ross created
> song.ogg".  Another simple relationship between metadata types might
> be that "ross created song.ogg" implies "song.ogg was created by
> ross".
> 
> The idea is that these implicit relationships would be used in
> queries, so if we have the relationship "ross performed song.ogg" in
> the database, then song.ogg will be picked up by the query "files
> created by ross".  At the same time, the file would not get picked up
> by a query for "files photographed by ross".

If I understand you correctly, this is exactly what RDFS (the "S" stands
for "Schema") and OWL do:

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/
http://web4.w3.org/2004/OWL/

The standards are already there, you "only" have to add support for them
to the metadata query engine, and you're done ;-)

Cheers,

M. S.