[XESAM] Extension proposal, alternative search services

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2007/6/7, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com>:
>
> I just wanna toss this idea out in the wild.
>
> I want to make it easy to have multiple services expose a xesam search
> interface. We would still have the standard desktop search engine with the
> dbus path and name as specified, but other implementations of the search
> interface could be useful too. Consider fx if Gnome's Mugshot applet (
> http://mugshot.org) exposed a xesam search service that could search in
> mugshot groups, feeds, and persons. This would not be suitable as an
> integrated part of the main desktop search service. Another example could be
> a xesam wrapper for the Yahoo REST api.
>
> This way we could (at some point in the future) have a small "swarm" of
> xesam search services (likely with the desktop one as the most prominent),
> and applications like deskbar could aggregate these in a a nice
> search-everything-you-can-dream-of-and-then-some applications.
>
> We can achieve this with almost no changes to the current search proposal.
> What we basically need is some way to introspect what ontologies the search
> engine is capable of using, and we probably need that anyway.
>
> What I actually propose is this: Add a session property vendor.ontologiesthat has value type aas, an array of ontology definitions which are triplets
> [unique_name,version,path]. So fx hooking up to the Yahoo service and
> calling GetProperty(session, " vendor.ontologies") returns [["yahoo", "1.0",
> "/usr/share/ontologies/yahoo-1.0"]].
>
> If the main xesam desktop search service had a 3rd party onto installed it
> might return [["xesam", " 1.0", "/usr/share/ontologies/xesam-1.0],
> ["my-app", "0.3.4", "/usr/share/ontologies/my-app-0.3.4]].


I was quite in a rush  last night so I forgot half the message of course...

The values of the ontology-triples [unique_name, version, path] deserve
description:
 - unique_name: This is a name that uniquely describes the vendor of the
ontology.
 - version: the version of the ontology
 - path: the absolute path to the ontology

This leads me with a need to define how ontologies are installed.  I would
suggest that an ontology is a directory under
{XDG_USER_DATA_DIR,XDG_SYSTEM_DATA_DIR}/ontologies named
<unique_name>-<version>. All files (in a yet to be specified format) in here
are treated as part of the ontology except one designated file (in a yet to
be specified format) which contain metadata about the ontology. This
metadata could fx be:
 - Vendor name (the unique name as in the dir-name)
 - Ontology version
 - Full vendor name (free form string)
 - Ontology description

Anyways, any thoughts? Cheers,
Mikkel
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