Comments on: semantic desktop

By: On Hierarchical File Systems and Storage Location « Thorwil’s

On Hierarchical File Systems and Storage Location « Thorwil’s — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:46:46 +0000

[...] topic is old enough to be discussed in the FLOSS [...]

By: Leo Sauermann

Leo Sauermann — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:25:32 +0000

just for the sake of completion and namedropping :-)

the semantic desktop is a bit more than you said above. Its a vision started by Stefan Decker and me in 2003 to help people communicate better and keep their personal information in a radically new way. That means, there is a lot more in it than just triples… but good to pick the name as title for the post :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop

By: pvanhoof

pvanhoof — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:11:51 +0000

@Burke: Tracker does integrate with streamanalyzer, which is Strigi’s extraction library. We do cooperate with Jos Vandenoever and Evgeny Egorochkin who are the authors of Strigi+Streamanalyzer.

By: Burke

Burke — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:45:37 +0000

Soi, whats the reason you do not consider to work together with the Nepomuk/Strigi people? They’Ve done alot work until now and you could benefit from their experience. I guess you could even share some code if not even more

By: Links 24/07/2009: Germany GNU/Linux Adoption High, FSF Speaks on TPB | Boycott Novell

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:15:08 +0000

[...] semantic desktop I named this post “Tracker” first as I started writing from that perspective, but the problems I’m about to talk are more related to what is called “semantic desktop” and not specific to Tracker, which is just the GNOME implementation to that idea. This post is a collection of my thoughts on this whole topic. What I originally wanted to do was improve Epiphany’s history handling. Epiphany still deletes your history after 10 days for performance reasons. When people suggesting Tracker I started investigating it, both for this purpose and in general. [...]

By: pvanhoof

pvanhoof — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:48:52 +0000

Guys, more coding less abstract debating. We still have a lot of work to do on Tracker (really).

Yes .. we as a team have a focus on mobile, but we are most definitely not going to stop you from helping us make Tracker rock on your desktop. We are very interested in your experiments, patches and work to improve the desktop experience of Tracker.

We already put some effort in integrating with the desktop. I for example coded a EPlugin for Evolution to get the metadata out of Evolution and into our RDF store. I’m also proposing patches to Evolution so that it would fetch bodystructure from IMAP, which will help us getting more metadata out of E-mails than what Evolution itself right now has. We can only do so much as our time allows us to do. And Tracker has several very high priority TODO items itself too.

For example named-graph support, a quadruple (done), backup (done) & restore (depends on a better Turtle parser), a better Turtle parser than raptor’s, etc

I know everybody wants this yesterday. Then join us on the development of it. We can put you to work instantly, just ask us (Jürg, me, Martyn, Carlos, Ivan, Jamie, Ottela and Urho).

Cheers, and don’t go too abstract about all this. Clone the repository and code a bit instead.

By: Jamie McCracken

Jamie McCracken — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:36:28 +0000

Tracker-storage should be fast regardless of its size or whether its used for indexing

This is because the ontology is decomposed into individual tables and each table’s I/O performance should be independent of each others (this is unlike any other triple store which tends to store everything in one big table or two and therefore suffers scalability problems and performance issues when DB gets too large)

Having a GB of emails is *not* going to slow down search of music files or metadata storage of application data

By: Jamie McCracken

Jamie McCracken — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:31:45 +0000

I’m pretty much convinced by now that the crucial thing for Tracker’s success is if applications will use it as their way to store data. And that means it needs to provide (almost) all the features of a file system. If Tracker doesn’t replace the file system, it will always be perceived as a kludge.

Not quite. Tracker is designed to fill in the missing features from a file system rather than replace it. It certainly was not designed for storing files although that is possible (possibly with version control and behave like a document store). I dont believe its necessary or critical to its success though

By: Seif Lotfy

Seif Lotfy — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:24:11 +0000

I truly believe Tracker is going the right direction by providing a central storage for all the data using an RDF ontology. But still a semantic desktop is only the data representaion. I think what is missing is something that makes sense of it. Having a good technology wont help out much unless you define some use cases for it. I sometimes fear that Tracker i targeting the mobile platform and not the desktop. Thus focusing most of its use cases on the maemo.

Personally at the Zeitgeist team we are looking forward to use the Tracker Storage as well as triggering the indexer.

By: Marco Barisione

Marco Barisione — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:43:04 +0000

@Will Stephenson:
Sorry, I’m not really an expert on the KDE stuff :)

@Rax:
That’s already almost like that, application basically will just talk SPARQL to tracker.