Anything about Tenor?

[Scott Wheeler]

On Tuesday 09 August 2005 21:20, Roberto Cappuccio wrote:

> I was thinking, instead, to ask you to start building Tenor on top of Kat
> technology. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
>
> All in all, at the actual stage of development, Tenor is an empty box while
> Kat is almost production ready.
>
> Kat is an architecture for desktop search, with its solid and expandable
> database layer and API. Tenor could simply add contextual linkage to Kat's
> architecture.
>
> Anyway contextual linkage will represent IMHO a minimal part of the whole
> architecture, maybe the most innovative and fascinating part, but still a
> minimal part.
>
> In other words, I think that Tenor should be based on Kat and not
> vice-versa.

Well, at the moment the problem is that because Kat is more conceptually 
limited in scope the database layout reflects that.  Essentially for 
something like Tenor you need the ability to store and work with graphs [1], 
which is something that it looks like Kat wasn't designed for.

To a limited extent that may be problematic in Kat, but Kat seems to have a 
few specific classes of information (thumbnails, fulltext and metadata) that 
it's interested in working with and the database reflects that.  Again, Tenor 
is more open ended, so it needs something more flexible.

That's not to say that something like that couldn't be built into Kat -- it's 
just that if you started reworking Kat to function that way you'd have to do 
almost all of the same steps as building Tenor.  So I think where the storage 
ends up happening and how the merging might look is something that can be 
worked on later.  Ideally there will only be about 4-5 classes in Tenor that 
touch the storage layer so those could either be ported to Kat's storage 
mechanism or vice versa.  I am interested in hearing your thoughts on some of 
the more technical aspects of such.

From the text extraction and all of that, I haven't gotten really familiar 
with the Kat API for that yet, but I would guess that most of that could be 
shared with minor tweaks.

This is kind of what I meant with the two systems being complimentary -- most 
of the graph stuff in Tenor would have to be built the same way with or 
without Kat. 

Cheers,

-Scott

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(data_structure)

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