How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again

Apparently

Apparently this hasn’t been echoed enough times. A lot of teams are still wondering what they should use if they want to store RDF metadata in Nepomuk and how to query it.

What happened before

We have refactoring to bring Tracker’s codebase into a better state. This is being released as Tracker 0.6.9x. This one sentence is really not enough to describe the changes. We can’t continue talking about the past forever. Sorry guys.

We have introduced support for SPARQL and Nepomuk in Tracker. We also added the class-signals feature, Turtle import & export, and many other features like SPARQL UPDATE support. Making the storage engine effectively a generic Nepomuk RDF store that can be used to store and query RDF data.

What will happen

We are at this moment planning to rearchitect Tracker a little bit.
Among our plans we want to make the RDF metadata store standalone. The store stores your metadata using Nepomuk as ontology and enables the application developer to query in SPARQL. This means that it’ll be possible to use this storage service without the indexer even installed. This is already possible but right now we do the crawling and monitoring in the storage service.

We plan to move the crawling and monitoring to the indexer. One idea is that the indexer will instruct the extractor to do an analysis and then the extractor will push the extracted metadata to the RDF storage service. Making the indexer and extractor a provider & consumer like any other. Making them optional and separately packagable.

This because we get requests from other teams who don’t want the indexing. Modularizing is usually a good thing, so we now have plans to make this possible as a feature.

Other plans

Other plans that we haven’t thoroughly planned yet include support for custom ontologies. We have a good idea for this, though. We want to wait for it until after the rearchitecturing. Support for custom ontologies will include removing ontologies, installing ontologies and asking for a backup that’ll contain the metadata that is specific for an installed ontology.

Support for custom ontologies doesn’t mean that application developers should all go spastic and start making ontologies. I know you guys! Don’t do it! We want applications to reuse as much of the Nepomuk set as possible. The more Nepomuk gets reused, the more interopability between apps is possible.

In Tracker’s trunk we have support for volumes. This means that we track removable devices appearing and disappearing. A removable device that disappears means that in your search result you wont see the resources that are on the disconnected removable device.

In trunk we keep a separate table with volume registrations for this.

In master we simply use the ontology. Which also means that we now make this information available to you as metadata in a clean way.

Some examples. List all the volumes that we know about:

tracker-sparql -q "SELECT ?o ?m ?z WHERE {
   ?o a tracker:Volume ;
   tracker:mountPoint ?m ;
   tracker:unmountDate ?z }"

That will return something like this (wrapping the line):

urn:nepomuk:datasource:/org/freed../Hal/devices/volume_uuid_XXX_ABCDE,
    file:///media/USBStick, 2009-04-01T13:38:20

The ones that we know about but aren’t mounted:

tracker-sparql -q "SELECT ?o ?m WHERE {
   ?o a tracker:Volume ;
   tracker:mountPoint ?m ;
   tracker:isMounted false } "

The ones that we know about and are mounted:

tracker-sparql -q "SELECT ?o ?m WHERE {
   ?o a tracker:Volume ;
   tracker:mountPoint ?m ;
   tracker:isMounted true } "

Let’s just for fun list the volumes that got unmounted before a specific date and didn’t get mounted anymore:

tracker-sparql -q "SELECT ?o ?m WHERE {
   ?o a tracker:Volume ;
   tracker:mountPoint ?m ;
   tracker:isMounted false ;
   tracker:unmountDate ?z .
   FILTER (?z < \"`date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z"`\") }"

I'd like to add that replacing HAL isn't our intention. Not at all. We depend on HAL to track this information ourselves. We need to know the availability of a volume and because we link every file resource to the volume's resource we can that way know about the availability of a resource.

It's under Tracker's own ontology prefix, and it's not really to be considered as decided or stable ontology API yet. We might change some things about it. It wasn't even a design goal to make this publicly accessible.

Why am I showing it? Well, because it's a nice way to explain one of our sprint tasks for the the next two weeks. I promised you guys that I would talk about what we are up to at Tracker. So here you have it!

We realize

At the Tracker team we realize that we should not only tell you guys about Tracker’s new features. We should also involve you in the planning and realization of software development at the Tracker project.

I have discussed this with our team and we agreed that I will make a summary at each beginning of our biweekly planning.

The reason is fairly simple: we want to involve the community and inspire them to become active contributors. But how can they contribute unless they know what the plans of the development team of Tracker for the next few days are? You are right, they can’t.

Which is a situation that we want to change. Therefor, here’s the summary of the plans for the next two weeks:

Ontologies

• Making tickets for an audio ontology that we made during a previous sprint to upstream Nepomuk.
• Craft an ontology for images that will later be proposed to Nepomuk. We will convert the extractors in our experimental branch to use the new image ontology.
• Applications need to be able to create arbitrary key value pairs to existing resources. We plan to add a custom ontology on top of Nepomuk’s NAO ontology that will make this possible.

Fixing things in the 0.6.9x series

• Changing unique value sorting to use collations and we’re planning to change the unique value queries for better performance.
• Making sure tracker-indexer and tracker-extract support detecting unmount events, and marking resources as unavailable, at a very early stage. This helps cleanly unmounting a removable device without keeping the device busy as the unmount request takes place.
• Supporting listening for a signal that tells us to pause the indexer. This will be helpful on devices that want us to be silent while they are performing a higher priority task.
• Evaluating and testing concurrent access.

Our experimental branch

• Start discussing merging our experimental branch to trunk together with Jamie.
• We have updated the new .ontology files in our experimental branch to include more specific rdfs:range information.
• Making it possible to observe changes about resources that belong to a class. For example observing changes in all nfo:Document classes. The granularity will be at the level of a resource. You’ll know whether a resource is updated, deleted or created. This task might take more than a week to complete. Ivan Frade is planning to write a blog item dedicated to this subject.
• To fulfill the requirements of certain use-cases we’re planning to make it possible to delete a complete resource (or a set of) with one function call.
• We might start working on adding support for application domain (custom) ontologies.
• Porting recent improvements on support for detecting file renames to our experimental branch.
• Evaluating isLogicalPartOf or alternative link as cascading rule for deletes.

When people are interested in joining development of Tracker, they can ping us at the channel #tracker on GimpNet. They can also send a E-mail to Tracker’s mailing list.

Here you go

I just finished the Evolution DBus metadata API‘s implementation. Information about this work can be found on this wiki page.

It’s currently not shipped as part of Evolution. Instead it’s done as an EPlugin compiled and installed by Tracker if your Evolution’s development package is 2.25.5 or later. At this moment that’s the versions in Evolution‘s and Evolution Data Server‘s Subversion trunks.

This API enables application developers to get notified not just about new E-mails, but also about any state changes of any E-mail Evolution handles. For example whenever the state of an E-mail changes from Unseen to Seen. You are invited to check out this Vala example to learn how to use the DBus API yourself.

Not only does the API give you “I’ll call you” or “pushed” hints about these state changes, it also gives you a lot of meta information about each E-mail: subject, sent, from, to, cached MIME filename, cc, service’s uid, seen, junk status, answered status, flagged status, forwarded status, deleted status, size, tags, keywords and flags.

The API will also inform you about message arrivals and about message expunges. Which are not the same as flagged for deletion.

With this information you have enough to build a simple E-mail client outside of Evolution that uses just this API to get itself informed about Evolution’s E-mails. That’s of course not the purpose of it, but it illustrates the completeness.

The purpose is to let a metadata engine like Tracker and Beagle get themselves fully informed and aware of all the state and metadata of your E-mails in real time. No more scanning of your $HOME/.evolution/mail directory. Which is by the way a for Evolution internal cache format that will change and has changed in the past. Scanning it yourself is for that reason too unreliable to depend on. This EPlugin uses Evolution’s own APIs, and runs in Evolution’s processes, to get the same information out and then pass it to one of Tracker’s processes over IPC.

“IPC??”, I hear you thinking, “isn’t that slow??”. Well we measured it. If a quite slow IPC like DBus can throw all of the metadata of 10,000 E-mails over in less time than Evolution needs to start up, knowing that we throw it over asynchronously with the user interface’s thread of Evolution, they I don’t think you should be too worried about that. But just in case you would still be worried have I specified the protocol in such a way that only the delta of changes since the last time Tracker registered itself are sent. While Evolution and Tracker run, Evolution will communicate new info with Tracker: Evolution pushes stuff into Tracker instead of Tracker pulling things out of Evolution.

What are you waiting for? Start adapting your $HOME/.evolution/mail scanning softwares! Now!

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.