Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Tue, 18.08.09 21:00, Ivan Frade (ivan frade gmail com) wrote:

Ivan,

Thanks, this mail is very helpful!

> > 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.


Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
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