Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

["James \"Doc\" Livingston" <doclivingston gmail com>]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 21:33 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> A contact can only have one metadata value per type (this is a primary 
> key constraint)
> 
> With everything mapped 1:1 you can then use RDF query to search them

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 23:39 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> denormalise it into Contact.WorkEmailAddress, Contact.HomeEmailAddress
> 
> Each metadata item needs to be unique so that you can get/set its value 
> individually as well as search it. Theres no way round this in any 
> metadata DB.

Not being able to handle multiplicative metadata would make some things
very awkward. For example what should happen with music that has
multiple artists? I think that supporting multiple values for a piece of
metadata, and being able to match any of them would be important for
both the indexing side, and the first-class object side.


What would be really cool is support for field groups, but that would
probably require a fairly large change. So you could do things like
correctly storing the release dates when a track is on multiple albums:

Title=Some Track
Artist=Artist
(Album=X, ReleaseDate=2000/1/1)
(Album=Y, ReleaseDate=2001/2/2)


With the Contact example above, what happens if I work for two
companies, and email addresses for both? Can I say that one set of phone
number, postal address and email address ies related (i.e. one company)
and another set is related (the other company)?


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
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