Re: single conceptial data object realised

> It indeed does not have much to do with OGo. It was more of a philosophical
> nature, regardless of implementation, but of course I am quite happy to
> have heard your responses.
> Let me just pull out snippets to reply to.
>> I don't know what "Opera M2" is or how it has anything to do with what
>> you propose.  But what you propose DOES exist in most desktop
>> environments - Windows provides WAB,  GNOME provides E-D-S, and I'm
>> pretty certain KDE provides one too (via Kontact backends I presume).
>> Not that there aren't rough edges,  but current technology is pretty
>> close to what you propose.
>> And it exists.  Of course it is up to individual applications to support
>> it,  but at least in GNOME and Windows most do.
> Ok. I know it is more or less realised if you use an MS Exchange server for
> example. However, I don't see Opera's mail client M2 interfacing really
> well with Microsoft Outlook.

A client on Windows that cannot access WAB is a pretty lousy Windows client.

It generally works like this, at least with most groupware servers.

[server]<---Protocol--->[client]<---Protocol--->[application]

In most cases, at least in GNOME and Win32, there is a 'shim' server on the
client that the applications communicate with (or at least a shared library)
that then communicates with the server proper.  In GNOME this is E-D-S.  So if
you add a plugin to E-D-S to support OGo (for instance) all applications that
use E-D-S are now, in a sense, OGo aware.  Applications can communicate with
E-D-S in a variety of ways (CORBA, D-BUS, ...)

> I guess that that Evolution Data Server (thats
> what you're referring to, right?) would provide such a thing as a central
> repository for all kinds of 'personal' data...

yes

> but would I be able to put
> it online somewhere and use say may favorite client for email with that
> repository? How 'standard' is it?

There is no reason you couldn't use an E-D-S server remotely, possibly 
via some
wrapper,  but I don't think this is done or supported currently.  Again 
this is
going to be tied to the desktop platform (Win32/GNOME/KDE),  I don't see you
getting around this for a very long time to come.

If you want standard then you use the LDAP/IMAP/SMTP combination with can
certainly be used over the Internet, and if your client supports SRV server
auto-location you don't even need to enter host names.

> Can I add a nonstandard tag and have it
> be propagated to each and every client, because they know the modified DTD
> or something like that?

With E-D-S I don't know; but it uses vCards which allow for extended 
attributes.
  But I don't think you can pass around 'data type' information,  or at least
I'm not aware of such a method.

With LDAP, yes.  Clients can query the schema of the server,  although 
very few
mail clients support this.

> Can I add relationships between data (XPath?) and
> browse from object to object, according to the diffent links I know for
> that object? It's kinda like a web/ontology-like web of relations that I
> would like to traverse in any direction, on top of a simple hierarchical
> storage design. I'll check up on Beagle, it was mentioned to me before. And
> I'll check up on WebDAV. What I want really is not really a personal
> solution for me as fast as possible, but also just wanting to know what the
> idea's are about this in 'the community' and how much of it is already
> realised. It would be great if something like this would, perhaps in the
> long run, become a real possibility for every home user.

Parts of it are realized,  but it is not a cohesive whole for really arbitrary
data yet.  The applications need to come along way in storing real meta-data
and not just plopping files into space.

> And yes, I also believe that this is a desktop environment issue, but it
> extends to providing access to it from wherever I could ever want access to
> it. So it must become a virtual desktop. A collection, that is accessible
> at any time from any place. Whether you would really want this, is a second
> issue. But it is quite interesting to me, for now.

Zidestore will provide you a fair amount of this;  accessible via WebDAV your
information is grouped into folders,  each project is a folder, with a folder
for notes and a folder for documents.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams - http://www.whitemice.org

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