zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Johannes Reinhardt <jreinhardt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Evgeny,

you might be interested in the different efforts towards a semantic
desktop, in particular Tracker [1]. This is quite close to what you
describe.

I do not believe, that a home-grown, zim-specific solution is a good
idea. For example, I do not like the idea of cluttering the filesystem
with files containing metadata, Integration with other tools is
improbable and a lot of work. A tool like Zim should offer
note-taking facilities, not a framework for storing metadata.

I believe that it might be a good idea to integrate Zim more tightly
with Tracker to handle Metadata (like Tags, a Tag implementation using
Tracker should be quite easy, as all the heavy lifting is done by
Tracker), but this poses difficulties for portability (afaik there is
no Tracker for Windows).


Regards

Johannes




[2] http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/index.html 

On Wed, 7 Jul 2010 13:11:02 +0400
Evgeny Kurbatov <EvgenyKurbatov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello everyone!
> 
> I use Zim for a two years for short notes only.  Although I'd like
> to exist the common way for storing any kind of documents, contacts,
> e-mails, notes, associating it with each other, Zim is not the proper
> way to do this (yet, but I hope some day).  There are some methods to
> organize data oriented to one particular task: Eviolution is good for
> e-mail, contacts, and calendar; Nautilus is good for files; Referencer
> is good for articles and for notes but with restrictions (as Nautilus
> btw); a lot of CMS like Drupal and Joomla with using plugins like
> DOCman are good but are heavyweight.  Only Google moves to the side of
> the total data integration.  However the Google way is the web way and
> it is not the proper way sometimes, moreover even Google is too far from
> that.  
> 
> Unlike CMS where data storage structure is hidden from the user in
> binary database, Zim uses the file system as the database.  In such a db
> the text notes have favor position over the data stored in other
> formats.  This is consistent with the idea of Zim, but complicates an
> integration of other data formats to Zim, the latest threads in this
> mailing list have faced the issue.  I propose to slightly shift accents
> to hold different data in more uniform way.  In future this can differ
> the concept Zim stands on but rise it to a new level.
> 
> The idea is simply the integration of Zim's database into a user's
> directory tree.  Every directory in the tree will hold a file named e.g.
> '.zimlocal' containing associations of files and directories with some
> data type.  In a simplest case a data type is the mark "notes page" or
> "folder" in terms of Zim.  As it is hard to distinguish the notes and
> ordinary files, the direct marking of them is the good case.  The
> non-marked files just places where they are, they can be attached to
> notes or not.  Every note page has familiar Zim's format so we don't
> need to change the engine much.  In a more general case '.zimlocal'
> files can hold the links between files bypassing or alternating the
> links in notes pages.  In addition there may be received a new way to
> browse data in Zim: in the left panel where the folders' tree is shown,
> can be the file and directory tree.  We can look further and see
> additional plugins allowing to deal with vCards, vCalendars, maildirs
> etc.  With this way we'll can associate contacts, e-mails, comments,
> documents, calendar milestones etc.  It may result a kinda OS :)
> 
> As for me, right now I strongly need a way to store comments with links
> for a big collection of an articles and books, and I don't need to
> separate this collection from the rest of files in my projects.  The
> Referencer which is used for now is not good for this.  I hope my
> suggestion will not seem useless to you, or too complicated.  Jaap,
> you're doing a great job.  Let's make a brainstorm and figure out
> something good.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Evgeny Kurbatov
> 
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-- 
Johannes Reinhardt <jreinhardt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>