Hi world, After many delays and flamewars I am very proud to announce the first stable version of the Xesam specification. You can read the specification online at: http://xesam.org (direct link: http://xesam.org/main/Xesam100). Unfortunately there are no PDFs up yet, I am working on this.
This release brings some changes compared to the two pre-releases that aims to amend some (and only some) of the issues that was unearthed during the Desktop Search hackfest in Berlin, Sept. 2008. For some background on this please see: http://xesam.org/main/Drafts/LiveAPIChanges. The tools, libraries, and server backends has not caught up with this latest release yet. With some luck and and lots of hard work these things should start trickling soonish. The XDG-readers probably need to follow the Xesam mailing list to follow this progress if they are interested. What is Xesam? Xesam is short for eXtEnsible Search And Metadata and is an umbrella project with the purpose of providing unified APIs and specs for desktop search- and metadata services. We are collaborating with several projects such as Tracker, Strigi, Beagle, Pinot, Recoll, and Nepomuk-KDE. Currently Xesam consists of four components: * The DBus Search API * An XML query language * A search language targetted at end users * A collection of ontologies for describing the data objects on a modern computer In the future we'd also like to provide: * An API for querying more detailed statistics from the search engine's index (such as term- and field counts) * An API for storing an retrieving metadata * A more inspiring website :-) Xesam 2.0 and Compatibility The first version of a standard is very rarely perfect and Xesam is no exception. There is already active work on a version 2.0 of Xesam, and we can already say now that version 2.0 will not be compatible with Xesam 1.0 (although it will be possible to write a conversion layer, if one can accept the performance hit). The changes that are being considered are: * Switch to Nepomuk ontologies * Change query language to one that can better leverage the power of a semantic, graph-based, metadata storage. Sparql is currently the primary contender * Switch the Search API to be stateless and optimized as to reduce bus roundtrips, see some very rough drafts at: http://xesam.org/main/Drafts/NewSearchApi It is my expectation that we can design the index- and storage- APIs (mentioned as future tasks above) in a way so that they will work both on Xesam 1.0 and Xesam 2.0. Thanks! I would like to thank everyone who has commented, criticized, helped, punked, and otherwise been awesome for bringing us this far! Here's to the future. -- Cheers, Mikkel _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
