The ontology descriptions of Tracker, now in Turtle

Thanks to Jürg is the experimental branch of Tracker storing its ontology descriptions using the Turtle format.

What is an ontology anyway?

Wikipedia sums it up pretty well: In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.

What is Turtle?

The w3 specification explains it as a textual syntax for RDF that allows RDF graphs to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes.

Turtle is the format that we want to standardize on. We for example plan to use it for some of our interprocess communication needs, we are already using it for backup and restore support and we used it as base format for persisting user metadata on removable devices.

An example snippet from the ontology in Turtle:

nie:InformationElement a rdfs:Class ;
     rdfs:label "Information Element" ;
     rdfs:subClassOf rdfs:Resource .

nie:title a rdf:Property ;
     rdfs:label "Title" ;
     rdfs:comment "The title of the document" ;
     rdfs:subPropertyOf dc:title ;
     nrl:maxCardinality 1 ;
     rdfs:domain nie:InformationElement ;
     rdfs:range xsd:string ;
     tracker:fulltextIndexed true .

nfo:Document a rdfs:Class ;
      rdfs:label "Document" ;
      rdfs:comment "A generic document. A common superclass for all documents on the desktop." ;
      rdfs:subClassOf nie:InformationElement .

Okay …

It only made sense for us to destroy and eliminate inifile formats like the ontology descriptions of the current non-experimental Tracker. Let me explain:

We have plans to add support for adding domain specific custom ontologies. By that I mean that it’ll be possible for an application to install and remove an ontology, to get the application specific metadata out and to restore this data as part of reinstalling a custom ontology.

As I already pointed out during my Tracker presentation at FOSDEM doesn’t this mean that we encourage application developers not to care about the base ontology. In fact we strongly recommend application developers to stick to- instead of diverting much from Nepomuk.

Meanwhile experimental Tracker’s indexer has started to work and is storing things in our decomposed RDF storage that uses Nepomuk as schema and can be queried using SPARQL.

Vision

My vision for metadata storage is that files are just one kind of resource. Tracker’s indexer collects the metadata about mostly those file-based resources. However. Metadata is everywhere: in META tags of websites and RSS feeds, in both locally stored and streamable remotely located multimedia resources, in E-mails, meeting requests and calendar items, in your roster and contacts list, in daily events, in computer events and installed applications.

Computer events? I hear you thinking. Well, for example a “hardware” event like your location changing just before you took a picture. That location can be harvested as metadata about the picture. There are many more examples imaginable.

For some datas is metadata the only thing really being stored. For example aren’t contact-resources having much more data than today’s ontologies describe. For most of the others will metadata describe the resource. And often, more importantly, its relationship with other resources.

We want Tracker to be your framework for metadata on both desktops and mobile devices. This is why we want to use w3 standards like Turtle over our own formats. We just happen to see things quite big.

No more old XML RDFQuery, but SPARQL. No more inifiles, but Turtle. No more home brewed ontology, but Nepomuk.

Merge-to-trunk plans

We are planning to start merging the experimental stuff to trunk, and start calling it the 0.7.x series of Tracker. Let’s see how many cocktails we’ll need for Jamie to get drunk enough to start accepting our insane, but already working, ideas.