Re: Future of GNOME: Semantics

[Anders Feder <lists anders feder dk>]

Michael,

Thanks for your reply.

man, 16 06 2008 kl. 11:41 +0000, skrev
desktop-devel-list-request gnome org:
> > Which are these existing applications? Can you give a few examples?
> 
> Sorry, I thought I did - Evolution, Conduit, ?Tomboy - in passing.

Why would changing storage backends be a no-go for these applications?
It may be the sentiment of developers if its presented to them just
like that ("here is your new backend, now change"), but I don't see how
it would be structurally impossible or impractical for these
applications to rely on a different store?

> > Also, how is RDF overkill for new applications?
> 
> Again, I was saying it would *seem* like overkill to the developers.

Ok. I wonder, then, why it would be perceived as such.

> Take Tomboy as an example. When starting out, had the developer had the
> choice, do you think he would have chosen an RDF store or still have
> used HTML in flat files?

Personally, I would probably have used HTML in flat files with metadata
annotations in the RDF store. I agree that RDF is not intended for
document markup.

> Because you're encoding more information, explicitly. ?For example, much
> of the semantics of an RFC 833 message is implicit its syntax, an RDF
> representation of that would include the semantics explicitly as well.

Isn't an RFC 822 message roughly just a list of key-value pairs?
Wouldn't these pairs map directly into predicate-object pairs in RDF?

> Cool! Are you suggesting Tracker as store? If not, why not? :)

Tracker would be a great candidate for a central RDF store. I don't know
if its developers agree though :)

> I see where you're coming from, but that has the same problem as the
> desktop search engines do at the moment - needing to write a parser for
> every format it needs to understand. Obviously, if Evo used RDF
> and ?Soprano directly then this won't be needed, but the problem with
> that is my whole thesis: RDF is too hard/inconvenient to be used as the
> primary storage model.

That is an interesting thesis because I think it summarize the sentiment
in the past few mails here and I personally still miss any evidence for
its truth.

> A decent helper library to assist implementing a D-Bus RDF interface
> that could be "bolted on", if possible, seems to be like a better way
> forward to my mind. I'd be willing to help implement such a thing, if
> that helps.

That sounds like a good idea to my ears - a generic backend interface of
some kind.

> Having pervasive RDF in the desktop would be awesome, the hard part is
> getting it there. :)

Definitely.

-- 
Anders Feder <lists anders feder dk>