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

[Vishesh Handa <me vhanda in>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com> wrote:

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.

Good to know. Perhaps we can use each others work over here, or if not, at least learn from one another.

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.

We currently do not support snippets. The overhead of storing the entire plain text seemed too much. There have been some ideas about using the positional information of the word index to reconstruct a snippet. However, this is not ideal as we do loose all text formatting.

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.

If you do land up implementing this. Perhaps we should use the same xattr keys? I've tried following this [1] for comments, and for tags we're using "user.xdg.tags".

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.

Strangely enough, in the years of the Nepomuk project in KDE, we have rarely had any serious users of Nepomuk apart from searching.

 

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

Sounds like a good idea. I don't have access to the actual "nepomuk" webpages, but Sebastian Trueg does have access to ocaf [2]. If required you can ask him for access and continue over there. 

Good luck with your project though Vishesh!

Thanks. 

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/ 

[2] http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/

--
Vishesh Handa