Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 20:26 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Le mardi 18 août 2009, à 20:19 +0200, Philip Van Hoof a écrit :
> > We'll do our best and are committed to formulate our answers in a
> > non-vague way and improve the communication of the project's members,
> > about the project, towards the community.
> 
> Maybe just clearly state what tracker (or tracker-store, the thread
> already lost me :/) will bring to GNOME if integrated. I don't want to
> hear about ontology, sparql, data store, indexer, or whatever. I want to
> know what it will bring me as a user, and what opportunity it gives me as a
> hacker, for my modules.
> 
> So, yeah. Just list use cases. (Somebody already gave a few examples in
> a mail, iirc, but it got lost in the noise for me).

Ok use cases..

Note that it's quite a lot harder to communicate these in a non-vague
way. I'll put the more concrete ones on top.

We are talking with Nokia's Telepathy team about a {I'm not allowed to
say the word, I'll call it a schema then} for Instant Messaging. This
would make tracker-store usable to implement all the use cases Andre
Klapper blogged about last week:

http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2009/08/14/wishlist-evolution-instant-messaging-integration/

Other use cases would be to let applications share bookmarks, share the
Photo library, share the Music library.

All applications would also know about tags that other applications have
set on those resources. For example, but not only, Nautilus' tags.

It would also be possible to accept another person's user metadata and
import it. Fetch it from existing webapps like Flickr, Facebook,
Youtube, etc (again, but not only, for example the tags set by other
people).


Those are all very concrete use-cases. The ones that are either already
or almost implemented as we speak.


Another perhaps more abstract set of use-cases would be the history
behind a contact.

Not only would that history display the chat log, but also the E-mail
log, the tags that you share with the person (and the resources that the
both of you tagged with them), Photos that are relevant to that person,
Music that is related, etc.

I'm just listing possibilities of course ..

A more recent use-case is Geo location tagging. We make it possible to
let them set and let applications use Geo location information on any
kind of resource. For example the GPS coordinates of where a photo was
made, but also the last known location of a contact.

Surely this is already possible, but the question is how usable is it
for applications that don't deeply integrate with the libraries that
make this possible? We want this information to be usable, everywhere.

For example, say I was at some location and I had a piece of music that
I liked very very much. I mark it as "super good!" on my mobile device.

That mobile device could now store the Geo location on top of the Rating
that I've just set.

Now we can make an application that will tell you the location where you
were when you listened to that super-good piece of music.

Or however silly-crazy you want to make it.

Point is that it should be up to the application developers, you know
those young new guys who have the crazy ideas. Technology should help
them, not block them, with their craziest ideas.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be