[Tracker] Tracker and Contacts - use case discussion

["Daniel O'Connor" <daniel oconnor gmail com>]

> It would be interesting for the Tracker project if qtcontacts-tracker
> and libfolks / Telepathy teams would some day sit together with us
> (the entire Tracker team will for example be at FOSDEM) to discuss
> use-cases and metadata needs.

Stealing from some of the good old timbl semantic web visions I vaguely recall; and some of the foaf-dev ambitions:

1) In a fashion not dissimilar to google calendar or a facebook event; I would like to organise something with my assorted contacts for an upcoming holiday.

Thunderbird interacts with Tracker; which has all of my contacts gleaned from libfolks and any other relevant sources. Tracker hypothetically also has a google cal API backend; which is consuming the public calendars of my friends, an ical feed of public holidays from somewhere else, and any facebook ical feeds which are present.

Thunderbird executes a sparql query based on the people I have nominated;
  1. asking for all events in a given date period

  2. Where owner/attendee one of (list of identifiers)

The resultset is transformed into ical or something Thunderbird can display locally; showing what my contacts are up to.

I can organise an event knowing who is busy and who might not be. The net result is similar to Outlook's scheduling assistant.

2) I return from my holiday and put my photos into shotwell.

Assuming by a miracle the date on my camera is correct, Shotwell queries tracker for calendar events and times roughly matching the photo metadata.

Shotwell prompts the user: "Was this photo taken at Upcoming Holiday X?" "Would you like to share this photo with other participants of event X?" "Would you like me to autogenerate some tags?"

3) Hypothetically, Shotwell adds a 'facebook tag' or flickr tag UI. Shotwell can query tracker for all contacts; or as in the above scenario; prompt a user with a premade list from the event.

When publishing to facebook or flickr; Shotwell can ping example user chat facebook com/fb33556323 via Facebook's "you were tagged in a photo" functionality. Ditto flickr contacts (if libfolks had them!).

Depending on the publishing mechanism (facebook, flickr, XYZ); Shotwell's interaction with Tracker and libfolks allowed it to select the most appropriate username / identifier.

So, some of them are a bit of a stretch (missing api, missing features, etc); but I don't think they are unreasonable problems to try and (re)solve in an efficient manner.

Events and calendaring have really been done well by google calendar and facebook; ditto photo annotation by flickr/facebook.

Why not make them easier for existing desktop applications to implement; while providing the benefit of desktop software - greater access to all of my metadata than facebook would ever be allowed?

I'll go back to lurking mostly now :)