Jonathan,
I think that you'll find that a lot of people in the general free
software community are interested in something like this. But
unfortunately, to do this well, it needs to be a LOT lower down than
gnome. I've come to the conclusion that it needs to be an OS feature,
so filesystems, system utilities, etc can take advantage of (or perhaps
more accurately, not break) metadata. Nautilus and other GNOME things
would be great clients to the OSes metadata service, but they shouldn't
be the service providers.
If you're interested in doing more research on this, I would suggest
looking at the Semantic Web work that the W3C is doing, as well as
efforts like Dublin Core and what the Library of Congress is doing. One
tricky thing you end up with is where the MIME type doesn't really map
to the actual "type" of the document. Like a JPEG that is a scan of a
book. That cuts down on what you can do programmatically. The Open
Knowledge Initiative, mainly spearheaded by MIT and Stanford, is also
working on a meta-information management API....as those apis become
published you may want to take a look. Of course, the other two huge
hurdles to something like this are how to deal with the network (how
does one transmit all that metadata across the wire? especially with
non-metadata-aware OSes, and filetypes that don't natively support
metadata), and how to make the algorithms for generating accurate
metadata not all that intensive computationally. Metadata is useless
unless most of it is generated automagically, because users won't be
bothered to add it in. Then you get into issues of "degrees of
accuracy" with how well the computer can guess what the correct metadata
is. So you lose the normal bivalence of computation, and have to deal
with vagueness in logical operations (because most metadata stuff boils
down to testing a logical proof's validity). It is a really hard
problem, that is pretty much securely in the realm of research right
now....not quite at an implementation stage. But hopefully this isn't
discouraging you. If you want to implement something to get us closer
to the metadata mecca now, I would suggest trying to get Medusa up to
snuff....incorporate filesystem monitoring in it, get it to be more
secure, etc. Then at the very least we can do fun stuff like vfolders
relatively cheaply, and use emblems to attach some metadata to documents
easily. That would be a great gnome 2.x project. What you outlined,
though, is really a huge task that is at least 5 years away from any
real chance of coming to fruition. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't
do some research in the area. It is rather interesting.
--Ryan
On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 21:25, Jonathan Bartlett wrote:
For anyone who's interested, I am writing a document describing how GNOME could assist users in keeping track of all their information, better than any other system I'm aware of. Please take a read at http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/computers/MetaInformation.html and let me know what you think. I know now is probably not the appropriate time for major infrasture changes, but it's an idea for something to do post-2.0. Jonathan Bartlett _______________________________________________ gnome-love mailing list gnome-love gnome org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part