Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Ivan Frade <ivan frade gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de> wrote:

I guess a problem here is that nobody except the Tracker people
themselves even know what an ontology or Nepomuk actually is.

 You can consider an ontology as high level language to describe data, a language to write "db schemas". Why ontologies and not SQL files? In few words, because ontologies are easier to describe the things, classify them into a hierarchy and express their properties.

 Nepomuk was a EU-funded project about "the semantic desktop". In that project, some research centers/companies defined a set of ontologies to describe the desktop and wrote some code for KDE. Nowadays we use "Nepomuk" to talk about the ontologies, and the KDE software using them is Nepomuk-KDE.
 
 

Just
throwing around buzzwords that nobody understands doesn't really help
dumb people like me actually get a grip on what tracker actually is,
and help them understand that it isn't what they thought it was.

Tracker 0.6 is a "usual" index engine: crawl the filesystem and extract words, so the user can use those words to find the content.

The new tracker (0.7) is pretty different. Now we have a stand-alone store (tracker-store) with a well-define schema to store the information (Nepomuk ontologies). That information is provided by miners: one for the filesystem (tracker-miner-fs), another for RSS Feeds, another for Emails (a plugin in evolution), and there could be more... (e.g. Zeitgeist could provide links between documents). Then the queries are not (only) free text, but (also) structured queries using categories and properties.

The benefits? Having all the information together under a common schema,

1) we can _link_ the information. So you could ask: "all messages with Martyn" and get a list of IM conversations (coming from telepathy), Email threads (coming from evo) and his blog posts (coming from the RSS miner).
2) we make the data more cross-application: your Bookmarks can be shared between epiphany and firefox.

 Regards,

Ivan









 

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4
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