What is happening nowadays?

Working on a metadata DBus API for E-mail clients. I have started a wiki page proposing the API for an implementation in Evolution.

Afterwards I started implementing it as a proof of concept for this E-mail client.

I plan to implement the same as a plugin in Thunderbird, Tinymail and Modest. Perhaps after reviewing the Evolution and GNOME specific bits and pieces of the proposal and making them more generic. That way, finally, will metadata engines like Beagle and Tracker have a sane way of accessing and getting notified of E-mail content.

Mikkel Kamstrup decided to wrap the API proposal up in a Xesam jacket which might end up becoming that ‘more generic’ API proposal. But let’s first have a proof of concept in Evolution that works with the stuff that we are working on at the Tracker project.

Yezs you can find bugz, diffz ‘n codez at Bug #565082 and Bug #565091. If you want to help out, just ping me and then I’ll quickly make branches of Tracker and Evolution’s data server so that we can work together on this.

There’s also a Vala client example which illustrates how to consume this service.

Tracker is by the way being worked on heavily. We’ve been making a lot of architectural changes to the indexer during the last few weeks.

Meanwhile has Jürg started working on adding a ‘decomposed’ RDF triple store. Making it possible to support any kind of ontology. Including the Nepomuk ontologies, which are at this moment the ontologies that we are aiming for.

Jürg also added a SparQL query language engine to it. Making it possible for you as a client developer to execute SparQL queries on the stored data. We’re not yet supporting everything of SparQL, because some things make relatively few sense for our purposes, but we have added a few SparQL extensions that do make sense. Like aggregation and GROUP-BY.

Here’s an example of a SparQL query that finds people stored using a Nepomuk ontology that have a specific phone number:

SELECT ?firstname ?lastname ?email WHERE {
      ?person nco:hasPhoneNumber <tel:+19071131826> ;
       nco:nameGiven ?firstname ;
       nco:nameFamily ?lastname ;
       nco:hasEmailAddress ?email
}

Here’s another example of a SparQL query that shows the ten most recent E-mails:

SELECT ?subject ?date WHERE {
    ?msg nmo:messageSubject ?subject ;
         nmo:receivedDate ?date
} ORDER BY DESC(?date) LIMIT 10

Or this one which lists all individual artists, count of albums for each artist and total playing time of all songs for the artist:

SELECT ?artistname COUNT(?album) AS count SUM(?length) AS len WHERE {
    ?song nid3:leadArtist ?artist ;
          nid3:length ?length ;
          nid3:albumTitle ?album .
    ?artist nco:fullname ?artistname
} GROUP BY ?artist

These are sample queries that already work, if you nag Jürg on how you can get some data into the tables. We’re of course working on adapting the indexer to populate the tables. Knowing Jürg this might already work flawlessly.

If you like things like “semantic desktops”, like having your desktop search cope with truly meaningful queries (the kind of queries that Federico was dreaming of in his keynote at Istanbul), then you should checkout the developments we are doing with Tracker. I warn you that a lot of this truly is ‘development’. It might not work at all, etc. But it’s cool. Really.

Let’s turn your desktops and mobiles into platforms that offer all kinds of services for your high level applications written in JavaScript or whatever language you fancy. Like configuration services, Thumbnailing services, E-mail metadata and notification services, Metadata query services. Meanwhile we’ll make you GObject-introspection so that it’s very easy to write a platform library yourself that you can directly invoke from those higher languages. As that project will make most language bindings almost automatic. And we’ll have Vala to make it easy for you to write services and other platform software yourself.

ps. The RDF triple store and SparQL stuff ain’t happening in Tracker’s trunk yet. That would disturb development of Tracker too much. We’ve been doing this in a git branch, use the branch “vstore”.

Good, that stack of links should keep you blog reading wolves silent for another few weeks.