Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 20:21 +0200, Stefan Kost wrote:
> Patryk Zawadzki schrieb:
> > On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> >> I get the impression that the focus is more on data storage
> >> than indexing these days.  I respect what the Tracker folks
> >> are trying to do, but I just need a good indexer to enable
> >> full-text search in Yelp.
> > 
> > Wouldn't it make more sense to have a system service available for
> > such resources?
> 
> Wasn't xsesame meant to be such an (dbus) interface? Imho tracker
> supported it a some point,

Correct, I wrote this support back then. But we since dropped it.

> dunno how its now and how it relates to sparql. Maybe other solutions
> should rather have a sparql query iface too.

The problems with Xesam 1 are:

o. No SPARQL, instead a less powerful home brewed query language.
o. Home brewed ontology that is flatter than Nepomuk (fewer
   relationships).
o. Complicated DBus API that among other things requires state.
o. Very hard to implement life search capability.
o. Has no API for inserting and updating data.

Together with other teams, we are discussing with the people who defined
Xesam 1. We regularly meet at conferences.

It's a long term goal to finish Xesam 2. Among the ideas are to let it
use SPARQL, Nepomuk and a less complex life search.

Xesam is proposed to be used as community layer around Nepomuk.

Tracker 0.7 ships with a DBus API, Nepomuk as ontology, SPARQL as query
language, SPARQL UPDATE for inserting and updating data and finally
signals-per-classes as life search capability.

The DBus APIs are simple but very powerful thanks to SPARQL.


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Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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