Desktop Search Hackfest/Schedule

This page is meant as a melting pot to come up with a schedule for the Desktop Search Hackfest, held in Berlin 18-22 September. Note that only two of these days are designated for the Desktop search hackfest.

Contents

[edit] Agenda Meeting Log

A log of the meeting held 04.09.2008 by most of hackfest participants is available here: http://pastebin.ca/1194108

[edit] Session Drafts

This sections lists all BOFs, Hack-sessions, or other gatherings drafted for the hackfest.

[edit] Xesam Future

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Where do we go from 1.0? Apart from the already roadmapped items for Xesam 1.1 what should we look into? Paged search results, extensions to the query language, life on Mars? Mikkel will give a brief (7 min) recap of the things that has already been aired as well as a few personal ideas. After that the discussion is free. This BOF should be placed after the Xesam Design and Critique BOF.

Attending:

  • Mikkel Kamstrup (host)
  • Sebastian Pölsterl

[edit] Xesam Design and Critique

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Voices in the community has aired dissatisfaction with the feature set and design of Xesam. We need to discuss this to get common understanding and to see if we can accomodate some of the problems. Mikkel will start out with a very brief (3-5 min) discussion on Xesam design principles. The participants will be expected to bring the bullets in form of concrete problems.

Attending:

  • Mikkel Kamstrup (host)
  • Jos van den Oever
  • Ben Martin
  • Sebastian Trueg

[edit] Xesam MetadataStorage API

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Xesam has long been promising to adopt a DBus interface to store and read metadata. Draft this API. There are baby steps towards this at [Xesam's iteration 2 page]

Attending:

  • Mikkel Kamstrup (host)
  • Anders Rune Jensen
  • Sebastian Trueg

[edit] Xesam Index API

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Xesam has long been promising to adopt a DBus interface to the metadata of the index itself, ie retrieval of unique terms, counting of terms etc. Draft this API. There are baby steps towards this at [Xesam's iteration 2 page]

Attending:

  • Mikkel Kamstrup (host)
  • Sebastian Trueg

[edit] Desktop Search Status report

Host:

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Each search engine should quickly describe what the current status is and what their plans for the future are in 5-10 min.

Attending:

  • Sebastian Pölsterl (host)
  • Mikkel Kamstrup
  • Anders Rune Jensen
  • Jos van den Oever
  • Ben Martin

[edit] Xesam-Gtk a Widget Set on Top of Xesam-GLib

Type: Hack session

Duration: 3h

Description: The purpose of this session is to design a basic set of widgets leveraging Xesam GLib to allow dead easy integration of Xesam search technologies in Gnome apps. We will start out with approx. 1h of hand waving, drawings, and discussions, and people are welcome to attend only this part. After this we fire up the laptops and get down to business.

Comments: Sebastian Pölsterl: I think it would make sense to write widgets before working on the bindings. That way the bindings and modules based on those bindings could include the widgets, too.

Attending:

  • Mikkel Kamstrup (host)
  • Sebastian Pölsterl

[edit] Desktop 3000

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h (depending on the number of participants)

Description: Assuming we have rich, instantly searchable, metadata everywhere what cool ideas will be possible? The participants will air their far fetched crack-pot-dreams and juicy fantasies in 7 minute presentations. Mikkel will kick the session off with his "Do-what-I-think-Desktop" idea.

Attending:

  • Mikkel Kamstrup (host)
  • Anders Rune Jensen

[edit] Xesam-GLib bindings

Type: Hack session

Duration: 1 day

Description: In this session Xesam-GLib bindings for Python and C# are created.

Attending:

  • Sebastian Pölsterl (host)

[edit] Xesam search modules

Type: Hack session

Duration: 1 day (depends on the amount of applications we want to write plugins for)

Description: The purpose of this session is to write Xesam module for various applications using the newly written Xesam-GLib bindings. I'm thinking of a Deskbar-Applet and Gnome-Do module. Feel free to add additional applications.

Attending:

  • Sebastian Pölsterl (host)

[edit] Xesam compliance testing

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h (depending on the number of participants)

Description: Xesam has a relatively simple API and search language. Nevertheless, none of the implementation are complete. We need a benchmark to judge how well every client works with a large corpus of documents to index.

Attending:

  • Jos van den Oever (host)
  • Mikkel Kamstrup

[edit] Implementing Indexes on Flash

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: The old disk head seek time enemy is slain! But flash still is block oriented so primary memory structures mmap()ed to flash are still as unwise as ever. The BOF is a general discussion of how storing indexes (inverted files, triple stores) on flash might allow techniques that would be prohibitively slow on spinning storage.

Attending:

  • Ben Martin (host)
  • Mikkel Kamstrup

[edit] Maybe replacing inotify as the base of Desktop Search Crawling

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Using inotify to monitor a collection of directories, maybe even a few hundred is fine. But if you want to monitor the entire filesystem, using something that allows all create,change,delete operations that the same UID performs to be seen would be great. Even more so on a device that is CPU/RAM contrained like the maemo ones, when the user might shove 32gb of storage and a few hundred thousand files on their mobile system.

Attending:

  • Ben Martin (host)
  • Mikkel Kamstrup
  • Sebastian Trueg

[edit] Xesam support for more interfaces

Type: Hack session

Duration: 1h

Description: Implement basic Xesam support for a selected search interface. (ie. Avant, beagle-search, tracker-search etc.0

Attending:

  • Still needs host

[edit] Search interface design

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Whats the deal with all the different approaches to search interfaces? Lessons learned? Likes/Dislikes? What should we see in the next-gen search interface.

Note: This BOF has a bit of overlap with the Desktop 3000 BOF. Maybe we should combine them? -- kamstrup

Attending:

  • Still needs host

[edit] Make Xesam Semantic Data Ready

Type: BOF

Duration: 1h

Description: Xesam is a key/value system and as such is not able to provide a search on a data graph as used in Nepomuk. In this session I would like to discuss how the API can be extended to provide these features.

Attending: Ben Martin

Host Sebastian Trueg

[edit] Schedule

[edit] Days Before the Official Program

[edit] Friday 19

9:00-12:00 Visiting the official maemo program and announcements
12:00 Break and lunch.
13:00-1400 Setting up hacking facilities in room(s?) reserved for our conference use. Agreeing on practices for documenting hackfest results.
14:00-1415 Spreading to work on the concrete hacking tasks (choosing from pool) - dividing to groups if necessary.
14:15-18:00 Hacking on coding tasks
18:00 Chill out.

[edit] Day 1 : Saturday 20th

9:00 Opening doors


9:30 Recapping schedule preparing to start BOF sessions
10:00-11:00 BOF Desktop Search Status report


11:00-12:00 BOF (*) BOF Xesam Design and Critique
12:00-13:00 Lunch


13:00-14:00 BOF Xesam Index API



14:00-15:00 BOF Xesam MetadataStorage API BOF Xesam compliance testing API BOF (*) Sharing tags and metadata between engines when not embedded in file


15:00-16:00 BOF Xesam Ontology Workshop BOF (*) Sharing extractors among engines BOF (*) Xesam and Nepomuk


16:00-17:00 BOF Xesam Future




[edit] Day 2 : Sunday 21st

9:00 Opening doors


9:30 Recapping schedule preparing to start BOF sessions
10:00-11:00 Implementing Indexes on Flash


11:00-12:00 BOF Xesam Future
12:00-13:00 Lunch


13:00-14:00 BOF Desktop 3000



14:00-15:00 Maybe replacing inotify as the base of Desktop Search Crawling


15:00-16:00




[edit] Day(s) After the Official Program