Re: Support for more ontology foo in beagle xesam adaptor

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

> Small question, why are there two different page-count fields?
> Couldn't they just be one like it is done in tracker. And what about
> pdf's, does beagle support extracting the page-count from that?

Noticing the ongoing effort to add more ontology to the beagle-xesam adapter, 
I think I should mention one shortcoming (or feature, depending on how it 
looks like):
Beagle was designed to be a desktop search infrastructure which can index any 
kind of data you want it to index. The "backends" and "filters", which are 
responsible for actually generating the indexed data, are free to put the 
data in any format they like. We never had any restriction on the names of 
the fields that they use. We mildly _suggested_ that they use commonly used 
names (either looking at similar Filter or Backend or by following Dublin 
Core metadata names) so that the UIs can also display results from that 
source. But it was never a requirement.

Developing the right namespace and name of the field for a particular property 
of a some kind of data is not an easy task. Also such a list was available an 
year or two ago, when most of the Filters and Backends were written. Thus it 
made sense to give the freedom to Filter and Backend authors. Note that 
nothing stops from anyone running Beagle to create a Backend or a Filter out 
of the Beagle tree and dropping it in the right place for Beagle to pick it 
up as a plugin. Probably the usual beagle UIs would not be able to display 
results from the new source, but thats the authors responsibility 
(BeagleClient API exists if he wants to create a special purpose UI for his 
specialized data).

What the above caused was a hotchpotch of property names and abundunt use of 
the namespace "fixme". I would not be surprised to find names 
like "dc:author", "fixme:author" or "fixme:tags" and "fixme:tag". Its stupid 
but it is a daunting task to decide a policy and make the changes 
everywhere :(

Frankly I am without clues how to resolve this. That, given the fact that life 
has been going well even with this mess, at least till now ;-).

- dBera

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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user