[Tracker] Integrating Tracker and Zeitgeist in Solang

[Debarshi Ray <debarshi ray gmail com>]

I have spent some time thinking how to integrate both Tracker and
Zeitgeist in Solang [1] and I am repeatedly hitting the wall when
trying to figure out a way to abstract out accesses to two different
databases. I am going to use Solang to describe my problem but I
suspect this would be true to some extent for some other applications
as well.

In Solang whenever we try to search (based on free text or URIs, tags,
Exif meta-data) we put the criteria in a search manager which
generates the SPARQL query and retrieves a list of photos from
Tracker. You can find a bit more in the FOSDEM slides [2]. Now it
would be only too natural to allow the user to search for the most
recent photos and such in the same way she would initiate a search
based on the other criteria. But this information, as far as I
understand, is present in Zeitgeist. So the current approach of just
iterating over all the criteria in the search manager and creating a
SPARQL query won't really work if all the criteria are divided into
Tracker and Zeitgeist.

Ofcourse the UI can be divided into "search Tracker" and "search
Zeitgeist" but might be a bad thing to do. After all the user does not
really care. :-)

So any suggestions? I am out of ideas at the moment.

Thanks,
Debarshi

[1] http://projects.gnome.org/solang/
[2] http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang-fosdem.pdf
-- 
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imaginary part.
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