KLink::Group

[Scott Wheeler]

Ok, a couple of things have been going through my head today -- some related 
to grouping, others which I'll get to in a separate mail.  A while back Aaron 
and I worked out the idea of a KLink::Group that would represent a set of 
links that were somehow topically related.  There are a few things that have 
popped into my head related to this today, so here we go:

First, originally in my thoughts and in the current API sketch I set out some 
specific link types -- Implicit, Explicit and Derived.  I think these should 
go away in favor of the more flexible KLink::Group.  So, I think I'll drop 
that part of the API in favor of a few groups that we expect to exist -- 
something like "Contextual Information", "Metadata", "Fulltext", etc.

The second thing that I've been kicking around is the idea of nested groups 
and if they're needed.  They're currently there -- and at the time I agreed 
with Aaron on adding them, but I'm having second thoughts.

I can imagine a structure that flows something like this:

Metadata
 - audio/x-mp3
   - id3v1
     - artist
       * Bob Dylan
       * Beatles
       * John Coltrane
         [...]

Or something like that.  There could be more or less entries from top to 
bottom depending on taste.

Now, the more I think about it the less I like this.  What if I want to do a 
search on everything a certain mimetype including both metadata and full text 
or whatever.  Same for all artists or anything loosly lumped into that 
category?

I think it might be more flexible to have just toplevel groups and work on 
subgroups as being intersections of other sets.  So if a node is in artists, 
and audio/x-mp3 and id3v1 then you could assume that it fit the same 
properties as the hierarchy above, but without the constraints.

Anyway -- I can expound on this more if this is unclear, but that's what's 
going through my head and something I'd like to have sorted out before I work 
out the database structure.  (Actually on that note -- anyone know a decent 
OSS database schema tool?)

-Scott
-- 
I hear that if you play the Windows XP CD backwards, you get a satanic message
"That's nothing. If you play it forward, it installs Windows XP!"