Re: [Tracker] About the itsme project

[Ivan Frade <ivan frade nokia com>]

Hi!

El miÃ, 23-09-2009 a las 10:13 +0200, ext Marco Loregian escribiÃ:
> Hi everyone,

> 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
> (Ã 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].

 Nice, other projects as Zeitgeist are heading in the same direction. It
is a very interesting topic. Tracker is (want to be) the place to store
the results of all that computation.

> 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].

 After a quick look to the web page, i wonder how "open source" is the
project? is it close developement (talking about code)? will it be in
the future? any plans for open developement?

> 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 

 Yes, except from the inference, everything else is done by tracker
already. We have also a QtTracker library [1], based somehow on Soprano
but offering higher level API. 

> â 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 âin a near futureâ 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).

 Sounds good. I guess you will hit the KIO/GIO compatibility problems,
but it is a very good moment to discuss how to represent the real files
on our ontologies.

> 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
> â and eventually contribute to its development, of course.

 We work in a completely open source way. Source code available, public
repositories and IRC and mailing lists available to discuss (and a lot
of active people so you usually get anwsers quickly). We are always
happy to see new applications using tracker!

 Regards, 

Ivan


[1] http://gitorious.org/maemo-af/libqttracker