Re: Announcing Wasabi - Unifying Desktop Search - feedback needed

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2007/2/6, Adam Schreiber <sadam clemson edu>:

On 2/6/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com> wrote:
> * In Short:
> Wasabi is new project with the goal of creating a unified, platform
> independent, specification and api for desktop search engines (and later
> metadata services). We have worked together with several search-projects and
> now have a proposal ready for public evaluation. In short: we need feedback
> from application developers - that means you.

Does Wasabi  have any impact on data source providers?  For instance,
if the Seahorse Project wants to have GPG key data or other encryption
related items show up in Beagle's results, we'd have to write a query
based data source specifically for Beagle.  Likewise, we'd have to
write another one for tracker in which ever terminology they use or
for whichever the indexing back end du jour is.

Can or should Wasabi include a standard method to make data sources
available and publish them with some sort of standard DBus interface?
I ask this because after reading the specs it seems like Wasabi just
sits between an indexer and a view of a users choice.

I see two different ways to look at this:

1) You want your keys (and metadata) *indexed*. This is not a part of the Wasabi search spec (currently). I honestly don't know how feasible it is to have shared filters/extractors between engines - because that is what you would really need to avoid having to code up against the favored service du jour. I can only say that from an app developers point of view it would be really cool to only have to write on way to index the data.

2) You actually want to *store* the keys right inside the service. This can fx be done with Tracker right now actually. In a Wasabi scope this would rely on the next-on-slate metadata spec+api. In the metadata api you would have methods to store metadata on arbitrary "objects".

Cheers,
Mikkel