DVFS and Metadata

[Timo Stuelten]

Hi!

Does it make sense to integrate some Metadata-Query-Thing (MQT) like 
Spotlight/OS-X into the VFS-Layer? If reading or creating new files, that 
MQT could then read contents, structures, metadata, whatever on-the-fly 
without the need to create copies. 
Or is it a completly different thing and listening to VFS-events and 
rereading stuff suffices? 
Or is it -- even while in the same pipeline -- completly seperated from 
the VFS File Access API and should be plugged into the VFS via some 
"I want all streams from the VFS"-API?

Background: I want some mechansim which does not only create some fulltext 
index for my text files and knows a few metadata types. 
Instead, if I store my new maya-model, that MQT mechanism should extract all 3D-objects from the maya model (via 
functional 3D-descriptions of things like chair, table, car, ...) for 
which I want to build some topic map like index (Chairs are in the files 
a, b, c, ...). Or think of files with MPEG-7 or RDF/OWL descriptors. The 
MQT must store data of previously unknown semantics then.
 
That has nothing to do with file-access but maybe file-retrieval. It will 
not work with some key-value metadata records. It will not work the 
way spotlight works (which, afaik, builds some indexes for full text 
and some predefinied metadata keys.)

It may need some techniques from the semantic web. So 
it is total overkill for a VFS < version 42.0 probably. But 
nevertheless: should it be possible to integrate or plug some non-trivial 
MQT into the VFS? Must it be reachable via the VFS-API? Or does no app want 
this, but only the desktop search tool and so the integration is some 
implementation-depend question or is totally independend from VFS 
and it should be called [A-Z]*(MQT)? instead and queries the DVFS, 
DConf, D.* asynchronously in late 2017?

I read something about GStorage and some projects around, which may try 
something similar. Is there some expert around?

It's still the requirements gathering stage, isn't it? :)

-Timo-

-- 
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Timo Stuelten
mailto: t.stuelten at tu-bs.de