[Tracker] My disagreement with a recent change in the ontology for GNOME Notes

[Philip Van Hoof <philip codeminded be>]

Hi Pierre-Yves,

I should probably have watched the ML more carefully now that it's committed and too late.

https://git.gnome.org/browse/tracker/commit/?id=6c1885f241880b528d29c2270022dac2bdd5be86
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=701828

+nfo:xmlContent a rdf:Property ;
+       rdfs:comment "XML/HTML or other rich representation of a document" ;
+       nrl:maxCardinality 1 ;
+       rdfs:domain nfo:Document ;
+       rdfs:range xsd:string .

I disagree with this approach. We should not put formatted content into
the Nepomuk storage:

The field is useless for any other application but the hosting
application. We can't query it, because its contents are formatted and
we don't have query capabilities to query your formatted contents. And
even if we would allow storage of formatted content like XML, we should
enforce the format using a DTD or other XML schema so that we're sure
that the inserted format is valid and known.

Neither of that is what nfo:xmlContent specifies, so I think it does not
belong in the ontology at all. Tracker's Nepomuk storage isn't a
freeform 'store whatever you want' with the sole exception of
nie:plainTextContent (which I honestly dislike a lot for the same
reason).

If GNOME Notes wants to store notes in Tracker, then it should store
data and metadata in it. And store UI data, like X/Y positions and list
offsets or indexes by itself. This simply does not belong in Tracker, at
all.

Allowing GNOME application to store whatever they want, using XML or not
(as I don't care about the actual format), is crazy. Model your
application correct and store information correct. Don't abuse Tracker
to solve your 'whatever' storage needs. And XML is indeed 'whatever',
just like JSON, binary, CSV, etc are: we can't use them in SPARQL.


Kind regards,

Philip

-- 
Philip Van Hoof
Software developer
Codeminded BVBA - http://codeminded.be