Re: Finding and Reminding, tech issues, 3.0 and beyond

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 15:05 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> <snip>
> > I couldn't this time last year either (and that's not a benchmark for 
> > how long it takes to learn either).
> 
> I don't think your case is a good one, given that you worked on Tracker
> almost exclusively during that time.

Well, to give another data point, my knowledge of SPARQL comes from an
hour or so of reading the SPARQL spec and another 20 minutes
experimenting with tracker-sparql this weekend, and I find the queries
you pointed to completely readable. So, I don't think it takes a year.

(With the caveat that I knew a fair bit about RDF beforehand, that I
know SQL very well, and I actually like SQL rather than hating it.)

But I think a Tracker specific SPARQL tutorial is definitely needed:

 * Because there are tracker specific extensions (the examples pointed
   to use a couple, like property functions and fts:match)

 * Because someone who doesn't know about RDF is going to be completely
   lost in a generic SPARQL tutorial, but should be able to understand
   concrete queries that, say,  involve properties of file objects
   pretty easily.

And yes, you also need a gentle guide introduction to the Nepomuk
ontologies - what do people need to know about immediately? What is this
NIE thing that pops up all over the place? Etc. Throwing people at
http://library.gnome.org/devel/ontology/unstable/ is not gentle.

[ BTW, the unfinished
http://live.gnome.org/Tracker/Documentation/AppDevelopersManual is
starting in the wrong place. You can't explain ontology before you
explain resource classes. You can't explain resource classes before you
explain resources and properties and give people some concrete examples
to hold in their head. ]

But also, I hope that we can keep knowing how to search metadata via
Tracker as its own topic - something you learn about when you need to do
it, rather than something that you need to learn about up front to be
able to work on GNOME.

- Owen