Comments on: Ubuntu Desktop: Contacts as Indexed Files

By: Ubuntu Desktop: Contacts as Indexed Files | Ubuntu-News - Your one stop for news about Ubuntu

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:30:54 +0000

[...] data on the Ubuntu Desktop. Making it much better than even MacOSX for standard data types. More here My main grudge with current methods is the “hide everything in a database” pattern, which [...]

By: G

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:00:41 +0000

That’s exactly how People files worked in the BeOS!

By: Daeng Bo

Daeng Bo — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:18:55 +0000

On a related note, I tried asking on the XDG mailing list about having a standard format for user mail directories (preferably simply MailDir in ~/Maildir), but was shot down because every client has a different database format (which was, ironically, the fact which prompted me to make my proposal).

I’d like to see more in the “everything is a granular file” direction (including browser history, bookmarks, etc.) and use indexing to mitigate the speed loss. Tracker 0.7 look like a great way to do this so I say “Great work on this post, and keep it up.”

By: Seif Lotfy

Seif Lotfy — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:50:08 +0000

Nope not really interactions are defined by an ontolgy. we will use inotify as a fallback for some events. We are also workng on storing our events as metadata in the tracker storage! Right now alot of applications are being mnitored by zeitgeist but we r working on lettng apps send their events to zeitgeist. The apps know more abouut their data than the filesystem.

By: Haschek

Haschek — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:15:02 +0000

I hope the Ubuntu/Gnome community is checking out what KDE is working on: The Semantic Desktop. I really would like to have something like this in Gnome You talking about meta data and XML, why not use RDF, it’s possible to serialize it to XML. Coming back to your example, the contact data could be in a triple store (for example Evolution should use this store too) and something like a WebDav port shows you the contact groups as directories and the persons as files. It’s all about overcome the data silos

By: doctormo

doctormo — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:12:35 +0000

Would we have to write a plugin for every possible interaction? Could you guarantee that files placed into a directory via ssh, ftp, or via wget or some other yet to be invented tool would automatically work?

I think of inotify because it is a one to many event handler that uses the very bases of how the system functions. But I may be able to be persuaded via irc.

By: pvanhoof

pvanhoof — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:03:45 +0000

We should also consider indexing, I’m not happy about Tracker, at the moment it seems to serve a very monolithic design

In master we are working on a split design. With tracker-store being a storage service that talks Nepomuk as ontology and SPARQL as query language. And the other part being tracker-miner-fs being the ‘indexer’ for the filesystem.

The tracker-store can be separately packaged and works independent of the tracker-miner-fs. The tracker-store doesn’t do anything related to filesystem ‘mining’ (nor has it a dependency on for example inotify or doesn’t it do file monitoring).

With Nepomuk and SPARQL Tracker in master fulfills the requirements that you gave in this blog perfectly.

I think you should really give tracker’s current master a try. We plan to release this as 0.7.x series (being unstable) very soon. Although only at 0.8.0 we will call it stable and production-ready.

By: Murat Gunes

Murat Gunes — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:58:07 +0000

I can see things along these lines happening with Zeitgeist FS.

By: Rob Taylor

Rob Taylor — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:56:19 +0000

Tracker 0.7 is no longer monolithic. The new core is an efficient RDF/SPARQL store/query engine. The infexer and crawler are both seperate and form just one way of feeding data into the metadata store.

There’s quite a few people thinking along much the same lines as yourself, come onto #tracker on freenode and chatt about it

By: directhex

directhex — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:53:44 +0000

Know what? BeOS was doing this back in the 1990s.

http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/before.jpg

Another reason why Be is awesome

*wistful gaze*