Le 23 avr. 05, à 15:27, Jesse Ross a écrit :
Thinking about the metadatas and the problem it is to keep track of
them (when moving your data on different OS, filesystem, etc.) I
think it should be mandatory for étoilé applications to have a
metadata "space" in their documents -- will be a lot easier that way
:-D
Are our documents going to be bundles?
Yes, most of time probably.
If so, then we can put the metadata in the info.plist or we could
have a metadata.xml or whatever within the bundle and always search
that file (as well as the contents of the document itself, if it
contains text) when doing a search.
Exactly.
I realize this doesn't work for files we want to be cross platform
(PDFs, JPGs, DOCs, etc), unless we're providing some kind of bundle
wrapper around these files that gets stripped off when we transfer
them to another drive containing a different OS (or via FTP) or send
them via email. The bundle method only works for files that are
already bundles (Keynote) or for filetypes we create as proprietary to
our desktop -- which might work if we provide export options into
standard formats.
hmm, because a bundle is just a folder, to take an example we can have
.doc files packaged in a bundle when they are created/used on Étoilé,
and when they are moved to a platform without document bundles support,
the user could just open the "document folder" he is seeing and looks
for the .doc file directly in it (at first level).
We could also implement the possibility to translate the whole document
bundles content in one .doc flat file (iirc I remember correctly DOC,
PDF etc. formats have "comments support" we could use to put Étoilés
metadatas and other specific stuff).
Anyone know how Tiger is handling this? Are they even using metadata
outside of stuff already available (filename, type, date)?
Tiger extracts file metadatas (I mean file system related metadatas
like size, creation date etc. and embedded metadatas like EXIF etc.) to
put them in Spotlight index (like a Lucene index).
Wen the user add new metadatas to a file (metadatas not supported by
file system or embedded in file format), they are only stored in
Spotlight index, but because there is one index for each volume,
metadatas are kept when the user move the file across volumes (but lost
when the file is travelling through internet I think).
Explanations about Spotlight in this document :
http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/MacOSX_Spotlight_TB.pdf
What about BeOS -- how was its metadata handled?
Unlike Spotlight or Beagle, all metadatas are stored at file system
level (BeFS), but BeFS has a Lucene-like index and mechanism to index
file system metadatas in a background thread.
Theorically that's better, but you need a BeFS formatted partition, and
that doesn't take in account content indexing unlike Spotlight or
Beagle.
Quentin.
--
Quentin Mathé
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
