Re: [Tracker] The Utopian idea, Tracker as it should be

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 21/09/14 17:05, Vishesh Handa wrote:
> Hey guys

Hi,

> I thought I should chime in. I'm currently the maintainer of Baloo in
> KDE, and was the maintainer of the Nepomuk project in KDE.

Thanks for joining!

> On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 6:22 PM, Philip Van Hoof <philip codeminded be
> <mailto:philip codeminded be>> wrote:
>
>     > 3) Moving the ontologies to their own repo still looks like a good
>     > idea, because there have been some tries to run tracker with custom
>     > ontologies. A different repo makes it clear that the ontology is
>     > not "hardcoded" in the store and can be customized "downstream".
>
>     Yes. I think we need to lead and allow certain extensions and changes.
>     Perhaps we should start with what Baloo and Nepomuk do agree on and
>     gradually grow it as industries and use-cases join?
>
>
> We, in KDE, were quite fed up with the ontologies. With Baloo, we're no
> longer using any ontologies. The project simple aims to be a good search

The tracker-miner-fs is already really good at this and the black 
listing rules are quite comprehensive. I plan to make things a little 
more user-friendly here over the coming year or so too.

> index for files. Baloo does not store any data and is just an index. The

In terms of indexing content, we do this mainly to provide "snippets" 
and to find content within files on the machine. This is really quite 
important when people are searching they expect this. In my experience, 
people are really not good at naming files well and that means you can't 
rely on just file names and directories for finding content by a keyword.

> small amount of information that we need to store - user tags and
> ratings are stored in the xattr of the files.

For xattr and tags, this is actually one of Tracker's weaknesses IMO. I 
was approached by a student (IIRC) asking about this in Tracker not long 
ago and they said they could have some time to build support into 
Tracker. I would like this and it would really fill the problem we have 
right now of persistent data for user tagging.

> The Nepomuk KDE project is pretty much dead.

Maybe for the desktop it's not so useful OR apps are simply not 
embracing the relationships between data like smart phones or set top 
boxes are. What's clear to me is, searching for simple file content is 
always the first requirement and it's never enough. Even for the desktop.

I quite like the Nepomuk ontologies and standardising a DB schema.

Good luck with your project though Vishesh!

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder & Director @ Lanedo GmbH.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/martynrussell