[XESAM] Minutes of meeting 2007-05-15

[Joe Shaw]

Hi,

On 5/19/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It makes easier to understand the ontology for both humans and software since
> > this explicitly specifies which fields should be used for a particular file
> > type/category.
> >
> > It is especially important for software, since it doesn't have any other way
> > to deduce this info.
>
> You are correct. Implementations can ignore this and the world would still
> stand. Your point about GUIs better being able to display metadata relevant
> to the object in question (in a dynamic way) is also good.

Dynamic user interfaces are usually pretty terrible because there's no
way for the software to determine what's relevant to the user.  One of
the things that bugs me about most of the RDF-based semantic whatever
implementations I've seen is that the relationships are presented in
such a generic way so as not to be useful (or worse, terribly
confusing).  Essentially you're displaying key-value pairs to the
user, and that's never a good thing.

This was one of the big things we learned in Beagle's predecessor,
Dashboard (http://nat.org/dashboard), and the reason why we have a
concept of "tiles" in our UI, which know how to display different
types of information differently, and which are programmed to know
what's important and what isn't.

I would suggest we steer away from developing a spec to cater to
dynamic user interfaces.

Joe