Re: [Tracker] Tracker and Contacts - use case discussion

["Adrien Bustany" <abustany gnome org>]

> > > 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.

There is already a GData miner actually, although it only handles pictures
at the moment, and it's not merged in master (shame on me). Adding google
calendar shouldn't be too hard. We also already have all the infrastructure
to handle the association between miners and web services (and even a simple
GUI to do that, although in a rough state).

> 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)

Thunderbird integration would be really cool. I had started something at some
point, but never got far, I know Martyn also had a look but writing
Thunderbird plugins is not easy :/

> 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.

http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1890 is about integrating Tracker and Shotwell.

> 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.

There has been some effort to centralize webservice credentials in GNOME, not
sure in what state it is... Thing is that most webservice require apps to
have
a unique key, and do some dance on the website for each app (at least flickr
does), so it's not that trivial.

> 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?

Facebook is mostly known for giving your data not to you, but to the
others ;)

Thanks for the ideas though, which are quite good. I'm not exactly sure what
we need, except people coding :) There is currently a completely unbalanced
situation between the possibilities offered by Tracker and RDF, and the GUIs
using that :/

> I'll go back to lurking mostly now :)