[XESAM] Minutes of meeting 2007-05-15

[Joe Shaw]

Hey,

On 5/20/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
> Right. That was not entirely thought through. I must admit that I find
> http://beagle-project.org/Writing_clients a bit confusing
> though.

Ah, I hadn't actually read that page.

> As far as I can tell from your words here I gather that Beagles
> HitType means "this-is-a" and that the FileType means "this-comes-from", but
> that's not how I read that site (fx. Document is a FileType whereas I would
> expect it to be a HitType with FileType=File).

No, you're getting them backward.  HitType is basically "this comes
from" -- hence "File", "Email", "WebHistory" but nothing more specific
than that.  FileType is "this is a".  You can think of it basically as
more general but in the same idea as a MIME type.  That is,
application/pdf and application/msword are both "document".
image/jpeg, image/gif, and image/png are all "image".

> The Category  is what Beagle calls HitType.

(You mean FileType here.)  What is the purpose of having a hierarchy
for Category?  What would "File" have that would trickle down to all
of "Video", "Document", "Archive", etc.  You had better not say
"filename", because email attachments often don't have them. :)

> The Source is where the object originates from, a more general
> thing than Beagles FileType.

(You mean HitType here.)  This seems reasonable, although "Source" in
Beagle means the specific backend which generated it.  But that's just
a terminology issue.

> Fields are "properties" that are available according to the spec of the
> category and the source.

Yeah, that makes sense.

> Then fx there could be a SourceURI field so that you could determine that a
> given image with source=Archive was from a zip file attached to and email...

Yep, in Beagle this is called the ParentUri, and that's what gets
opened by the UIs.

Joe