[XESAM] Minutes of meeting and new meeting scheduled

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

New meeting:
15/5-07 at irc://FreeNode/#xesam, at 18:00 UTC / 19:00 BST / 20:00 CET

Minutes of todays meeting:

Attending: Evgeny, Jamie, Jos, Sebastian, Mikkel, Alexandr, Pieter

* It was decided to start to flesh out the ontology in the wiki. This will
be done by Evgeny (aka Phreedom) which will do all the editing to make sure
we stay consistent. The format in the wiki is *intermediate* as described
here http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/XesamMetadataFieldsDraft. This format
cannot contain all the needed details, but it should be good enough to get
the ball rolling.

* The field names should be namespaced with "xesam" and have "." as property
separator. Ie. "xesam:audio.codec".

* The actual encoding of the ontology was (as expected) under much debate.
RDF vs .desktop. We all agreed that we should map nicely to and from RDF no
matter what format we end up with.
  - Pro RDF: Extensibility, widely adopted, has tools already, can integrate
with web apps
  - Pro .desktop: Simple, known by almost all devs, easy to parse

* It was proposed to allow both .desktop and rdf ontologies. Jamie and
Mikkel was against this.

* It was also discussed how library dependencies should be tackled  if a
(say) RDF parser was to be implemented. It was pointed out that xesam should
also run on embedded devices so that external dependencies should be heavily
considered.

* It was agreed that we need a type system with inheritance - here "type"
means Video, Audio, Webpage, Application, Email, Contact, etc. Inheritance
could be used fx like Conversation<-Email, Conversation<-IM. The .desktop vs
RDF wars erupted again, now just for the type system.

 * It was debated whether or not the type system should be independent of
the field definitions. Mikkel thought it was a good idea because "loose
coupling and strong cohesion" are good design principles. Sebastian thought
the interdependent systems where better because you certain fields could be
defined for certain types then.

I will put the IRC log on the wiki tomorrow morning.

Cheers,
Mikkel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20070515/36882c7d/attachment.html