[Tracker] About the itsme project

[Marco Loregian <marco loregian itsme it>]

Hi everyone,
I am Marco Loregian, member of the tech staff of itsme, an Italian
company that is implementing a new metaphor for interacting with data
and resources in a typical knowledge work scenario. The advancements
of our work are available at http://www.itsme.it

Some of you have already been in contact with Michele Tameni (a.k.a.
NetVandal), who asked me to post some details about the project here:
I'll try to sum up what we are doing and why we are interested in
Tracker.

Nowadays PC user interfaces are mostly based on the desktop metaphor
(what you see and what you can do is presented in terms of a
old-fashioned office); our project aims at developing a new metaphor,
based on "stories and venues". The idea is that people live different
stories, in which they communicate, create and receive documents and
media, get informed about other people and about the world. Instead of
forcing PC users apply the desktop metaphor to keep things sorted in
folders, or to put everything together and then search to find things
(à la Google), we aim at providing them a venue for each of their
stories, and a system that helps them keeping things in the right
place. By things we mean email messages, documents, media and also
resources like contacts, RSS feeds and Web widgets [1].

We are working on a GUI (that we generally also call itsme) and on a
meta/data management system (that we call Guglielmo [2]). We have
already a prototype working, even if we can only show you a video at
the moment [3].

The reason we are interested in Tracker is that we noted that some
(most) of the functionalities we need and that we were planning to
implement in Guglielmo are already available in Tracker 0.7. For
example, we currenty adopt Soprano for RDF storage and were looking
into Strigi for metadata Extraction, developing our own metadata
manager to handle items: get metadata out of documents, make some
reasoning on it and then store everything. This is pretty much (except
from inference, as far as we got) what can be done with Tracker in a
much easier and reliable way – and also more consistent with all the
rest of our system. We are also developing other functionalities, less
related with what you are doing (for example, a Virtual File System to
have –in a near future– uniform access across distributed storage
units, and presenting data according to our metaphor, and that can be
configured to work with other metaphors as well).

We'd like our help to be mutual: if we can adopt Tracker to provide
Guglielmo with the basic features we need, we'd also like to
understand what we could do to test its limits and use it at its best
– and eventually contribute to its development, of course.

I'll be glad to answer any further question.

Ciao,
Marco

References:
[1] http://www.itsme.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/itsme-innovatingworkstations.pdf
[2] http://itsme.it/news/2009/05/01/guglielmo-01-architecture-rc3/
[3] http://itsme.it/news/2009/08/06/itsme-prototype-video/


P.S. An itsme emulator is available at http://itsme.it/emulator/

---
web: www.marcoloregian.net // skype: marco.loregian