Metadata, Gnome Storage and Novell iFolder

[Stefano Spinucci]

Hello list,

I tried to talk about this with Seth Nickell (Gnome Storage) and Miguel De Icaza
(Novell iFolder) without having a prompt reply (Miguel CCed my message to Brady
Anderson), then I'm trying here.

You know how important are metadata about documents, to manage or to find them,
and how important they'll become in the future (anyone heard about the "marvel"
of the next Longhorn filesystem, WinFS ?).

There are at least two linux "big" project about metadata for the end user :
Gnome Storage (http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/) and Novell iFolder
(http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder -
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2003/Nov-13.html).

And I think 'll be a good idea to have a metadata standard, _implementation_ and
_platform_ independent.

Think about this : I could be wrong, but Gnome Storage 'll be Gnome dependent;
Novell iFolder 'll be Mono dependent (and maybe platform independent), and I
hope (but I'm not sure) they 'll use the same metadata.

Furthermore I could like having my metadata stored in extendend attributes at
filesystem level (Reiser4 or XFS), or flat file, or xml file and whatever else,
and use them in Linux, and then in OSX, and in Windows (sic!) and back in Linux.

Then I guess if also you (like me) would like to have an unified metadata
standard, starting from Dublin core (www.dublincore.org), Open Source Metadata
Framework (www.ibiblio.org/osrt/omf), or whatever you like.

And maybe Freedesktop would open a page to share ideas and start a project.

Thanks,
Stefano