Re: single conceptial data object realised

Hey Adam,

thanks for your information. It seems, from your comments at least, that a  
really visionary approach to this, this what I want, has not been  
undertaken by any sufficient large community. I do see that e.g. E-D-S and  
Evolution or OGo with Zidestore and any client would provide some of the  
functionality that I would like to have, and in quite a nice amount as  
well. My issue is really in the first place, for me personally, to get  
multi-platform multi-location access to the same email and contacts store.  
I guess this is easily accomplished by setting up IMAP with LDAP and SMTP.  
I like the independence of the datastore from the application that uses  
it, this is a perfect setup, then, of course. Now all we need is good  
applications that make use of the information in an integrated way. But if  
we want to add Calendar support, we need to set up a calendar server of  
some kind, such as OGo, if I understood its functionality correctly. You  
see, now I have 3 servers running (although I could use OGo for the  
contacts as well, I guess). Perhaps some service provider will set this  
up. I could. And I could access these stores from any location or  
platform, but my software will need to support all these different  
protocols. Would I add another type of information I'd face the same  
problem again; my software needs to expand to take the new formats into  
account. There is no generic approach to this. Of course, no software can  
magically adapt to any format given, at least not in any usable way. XML  
paves the way for this though. Still, all software needs appropriate  
design in order to handle a given format. I guess, perhaps I am not aware  
of the newest most powerful design methodologies, but I consider it  
unlikely any software could ever exist that meets the needs of the human  
user just based on logical and perhaps semantical structure of  
information. But who knows. Anyway, it seems quite a labour-intensive way  
of providing new formats for use and storage by people. Perhaps we should  
all just use WebDAV and nothing else ;). The point is, I can't just  
conceive of a new way of storing information, say my own associations  
between a contact and a document on my hard disk, in which I may encode  
just the mental link I had when conceiving of the association (e.g. "the  
contact is someone who happened to write something about the same subject  
the document is on": a clear personal association in which I link contact  
with document. Perhaps I would want to be able to perform an SQL style  
search to retrieve emails related in this or some other way to this  
specific file. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I can make up very functional  
relationships.

I guess that are theories on this. On having generic information with on  
it imposed a certain logical or semantical structure. XML and DTD is just  
a popular example of this, of course. XML is only syntical though, and  
perhaps there have already circulated ideas to make a semantical layer on  
top of a DTD, but I don't know how advanced linguistic/AI theory is at  
this point. It would certainly not be trivial. It would not at all be  
necessary though, to have this, for just my own goals. I think it would be  
very easy indeed to have this realised. It is no mindbreaker. Alas, the  
world is not organised in such a way... that it would be organised. Enough  
to conceive of and put efforts into realizing a truly crossplatform way of  
storing generic information. It would just require large projects.  
Cohesive collaboration; shared visions. I don't see why anyone would NOT  
want to have this, this generic data storage and navigation technology,  
but I don't guess anyone has a large enough vision and a large enough  
supporting base to actually realise this and actually have it be used.

Well, I thank you for your input,

Greetings, Bart

Op Thu, 06 Oct 2005 16:42:56 +0200 schreef Adam Tauno Williams  
<[email protected]>:

>> 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.
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