Xesam, eXtEnsible Search And Metadata specification

Xesam is an umbrella project with the purpose of providing unified APIs and specs for desktop search- and metadata services. We are collaborating with several projects such as Tracker, Strigi, Beagle, Pinot, Recoll, and Nepomuk-KDE.

Motivation

Searching has become an integrated part of every computer user's workflow. Both on the Internet and on the desktop, search is a hot topic that is explored and experimented with. Everybody is Google-ing this, and Yahoo!-ing that, and both Apple and Microsoft are integrating desktop search deeply into their products.

The FOSS world reflects the rest of the world and have caught on to the trend as well. Various projects are gathering momentum, but there is visible hesitation to adopt any of the new technologies. Enter xesam. One of the goals of the xesam project is to provide a common dbus API for desktop search engines. This will allow projects and users to choose the search engines that suits their needs, much like X11/EWMH allows people to use alternative window managers currently.

Search is not the only hype right now. Concepts like value added services, tagging, and contextual- and related information are also among the buzzwords du jour. This is heavily interconnected with the world of searching. When the xesam search specification is (nearly) set in stone we will start to work on a desktop metadata specification, that should allow for such metadata dependent technologies to become available on the free desktop.