Re: [gnome-love] Meta Information in GNOME

[Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb eskimo com>]

> 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.  

Actually, I disagree.  I've thought about this a lot, and it seems that as
an OS feature, it would really suck, especially for multiuser systems
(each user needs their own copy of the meta-data, especially when they
disagree).  Also, for the OS to be involved with doing callbacks to create
cached metadata like thumbnails would be insane.

>       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

I've looked into this a little, and I think they are good pointers to how
the internals might work.

> 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.  

Where does one find this project?

> 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.  

The issue for individuals managing their own metadata is inherently much
more simple.  It doesn't even require support from external entities
(like websites) at all.  For example, as a user, I could mark categories
on my email, web page bookmarks, and documents.  Then, when I use Nautilus
to browse by category, it pulls up links to the relevant information.

> Metadata is useless
> unless most of it is generated automagically, because users won't be
> bothered to add it in.  

Although this might be true for home users, heavy users of information
will probably think differently, like those who have to manage a thousand
projects.  If they can tag all of their relevant resources - emails, web
pages, documents, with each project's tag, and also mark priorities, it
becomes very useful.

> 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).  

I think this is where people start becoming architectural astronauts, and
trying to make a self-aware being through metadata.  Real usage of
metadata is much simpler.

Anyway, would you happen to know who on the GNOME team would be most
interested in this?

Jon

> 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
> >
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