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Xesam
Xesam is short for eXtEnsible Search And Metadata and 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.
News
Common Data Extractor
At 2009 Gran Canaria Desktop Summit it was announced that Nepomuk-KDE and Tracker are going to use a common data extraction library: libstreamanalyzer, one of libraries of Strigi. This will let all involved projects to spend less time fixing bugs and will likely provide a larger selection of data extractors.
Xesam vs Nepomuk?
At 2008 Xesam HackFest it was decided to merge Xesam and Nepomuk efforts in an attempt to strengthen both communities and create a true cross-desktop semantic framework. Nice bits of Xesam ontology will be merged into Nepomuk. Xesam.org will maintain FDO-specific extensions to the Nepomuk ontology and FDO-specific APIs such as DBUS API specification.
Resources
Specifications
Unstable Xesam Search Specification (work in progress)
XESAM v1.0, Stable Release, released 2009-05-02
XESAM v0.95, Release Candidate 2, released 2008-03-23
XESAM v0.9, Release Candidate 1, released 2007-10-22
Software
About Xesam
Contact
Current communications go via two channels:
IRC in the #xesam channel on FreeNode
Bugs on our freedesktop.org Bugzilla product
Project Structure
Xesam is a 100% community effort and developed with an emphasis on openness and transparency. For the details see the ProjectStructure page
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.