[Xesam] RFC: Current State of Xesam and Future Plans

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

Hi all,

I just thought it might be a good time to do a round up of the current state
of affairs as I see it. Also it might be a good time to make it more
concrete what we should be doing in the future.

Current State of Xesam
-----------------------------
As most people probably know we are at RC2. The current Search interface has
been stable for good while (long before RC1) and is very unlikely to change
for 1.0.

The ontology is probably the part of the spec most likely to receive
changes. It is a very big (and complex) part of the spec and has
unfortunately not received as much review and feedback as I would like (I
think Evgeny (that would be the onto maintainer) agrees on this). As it
stands this is the main thing blocking us from making a 1.0 spec.

Current State of Xesam Implementations?
-------------------------------------------------
Afaik there are four search engines with some level of Xesam compliance (in
alphabetic order): Beagle, Pinot, Strigi, and Tracker. If there are anybody
on this frequency able to make informed status reports on the progress of
the implementations, then I'd love to have a small report. Fx:

 * API completeness
 * Onto support
 * XML Query support
 * User Search Lang. support
 * Roadmap to feature completeness (of full Xesam 1.0 support)

Future
--------
There are two things to consider. What to do, and when to start doing it.
About the 'when' first:

The only thing blocking me for starting to bang on the next iteration of
Xesam is lack of time. The other thing is that people tend to get confused
if we juggle about too many issues at the same time - hence it might be good
to roll 1.0 before we move on. I do however see a few signs that people are
starting to want to expand the standard. Me lacking time should of course
not stop people from doing this, but they will need to do the hard lobbying
them selves until I can free up some time (and it takes more time than you
might imagine).

So about the 'what':
There are some *very* sketchy ideas on http://xesam.org/main/XesamIteration2.
You should check Jos' recent thread on this very list too.

Please chime in with what ever you have of comments. Cheers,
Mikkel
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