[XESAM] Minutes of meeting 2007-05-15

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On Monday 21 May 2007 19:29:34 Joe Shaw wrote:
> 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.

Not sure what you mean by "knowing how to display", but when app encounters 
meta-data outside of the core or known onto, it has to deal with it 
nevertheless. The more structured the onto is, the more opportunities the app 
has to present/process the data properly.

Will take a closer look at your "tiles"...

--Evgeny