Re: Proposing Tracker for inclusion into GNOME 2.18

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> 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.

its not a problem if we store multiple values as a commas separated list 
(the values in question would have to be strings)

the fulltext index breaks up strings into individual words and indexes 
those words so theres no loss of functionality there.

Substring searches are supported in our rdf query implementation so you 
will be able to search inside them


> 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)

that would be tricky unless the album was a separate object

> 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)?

if we support vCard spec then its more a question of does vCard support 
that?

looking at evolution's contacts screen it does not look like its support 
more than one work email (it has home, work and other)


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/