creating a content system

[Scott Wheeler]

On Wednesday 10 August 2005 13:03, Roberto Cappuccio wrote:
> Alle 12:41, mercoledì 10 agosto 2005, Stanislav Karchebny ha scritto:
> > Just a little note about "i will never use such a feature". You will not
> > have to _use_ it, since it will be naturally integrated in the user
> > interface. You will just feel a little bit naked after installing an
> > ancient copy of KDE 3.4.1 and screaming "where the hell is that skype
> > conversation related to this file in my doc/ folder, why is it not shown
> > here in 'Whats Related' area?"....
>
> I think that 95% of times that relationship would be also reflected by the
> content of the document I'm searching for.
> But I admit, I could also being underestimating the power of contextual
> search. Maybe using it I would appreciate it better.

I think you're overestimating traditional search, actually.  :-)

Take images for example -- aside from the metadata, which is almost always 
pretty useless, it's almost impossible to do interesting search on images 
without context.  That's an easy case to point to, but one that we see pretty 
easily with i.e. Google image search.

The other thing that I think you're overestimating is the reach of 
"documents".  You mentioned your mails being indexed, but that's mostly luck 
-- you happen to have them locally in a format that an indexer can handle, 
but actually if Till gets his way (most active KMail developer at the moment) 
mail will be stored in a very different way in KDE 4.  i.e. mails won't be 
files anymore.

I could go through other examples, but those are two of the easier ones -- 
that's what got me to the point of thinking that file indexing is just the 
start, but that effective desktop search needs to account for context and 
more generalized resources than files.

(But again, that seems to be mostly beyond the scope of Kat and I don't think 
there's a huge overlap there.)

-Scott

-- 
Three words: you have no clue
-Slashdot