On 19/10/06, Jamie McCracken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ross Burton wrote: > > Also, if I search for "created by ross" how does the system need to know > > that it should search File.Publisher, Audio.Artist, Audio.Performer, > > Doc.Author and Image.Creator? The naming scheme here is inconsistant > > and redundant. > > If we were a dedicated search tool then yes but we are a metadata DB as > well so we need specific metadata names as Audio.Artist and > Aduio.Performer can contain different values and we might want to only > search one of those fields.
I think that the idea Ross is trying to get across here is that rather than having a flat namespace of metadata types, you want to have relationships between the metadata types (metadata about metadata). For example, we might have a have a relationship that says that "ross performed song.ogg" is a specialised version of "ross created song.ogg". Another simple relationship between metadata types might be that "ross created song.ogg" implies "song.ogg was created by ross". The idea is that these implicit relationships would be used in queries, so if we have the relationship "ross performed song.ogg" in the database, then song.ogg will be picked up by the query "files created by ross". At the same time, the file would not get picked up by a query for "files photographed by ross". This is particularly important in a system with an extensible metadata system. If app developers can introduce arbitrary new metadata types, it would be nice to know how they relate to other existing types. As another example, consider a developers experimenting with a new class of application. Lets say that two projects define some metadata types for the files that they produce respectively. These types will be distinct (hopefully there is something in the spec for namespacing custom metadata), but a user might want to search both types of documents. So it would be nice if the metadata query system could be told that sets of metadata types are equivalent. If the apps mature and agree on a common set of metadata types, they'd probably want to include mappings between the new standard types and the legacy ones. James. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list