Dear Lazyweb: my information management is in dire need of an upgrade. In
particular, I am looking for two features, the second of which is an extension
of the first. So let's start with the first:
Given a certain issue a job, a project, I write and receive emails, send
and receive letters, make and receive phone calls, and author all kinds of
documents. In addition, I may have other tidbits of information, such as
bookmarks and contact information of the involved people, which are related to
the issue at hand.
I can store the documents and letters in folders on my filesystem, but what
emails and bookmarks and contact information are isolated from the filesystem
by the application through which I access this information, even though they
may be stored in standard formats. I do not want to create redundant
information by copying emails to the respective folders in the filesystem, not
only because of the error potential in forgetting that one message which you
later need.
What I want is a high-level view ideally command-line based into my
information, such that for any given project, I can easily and immediately
access all related correspondence, documents, and data. I almost want
something like a customer relation management system (CRM), except that
I don't want to organise my data contact-centric, but rather issue-centric: an
issue may involve nobody, a dozen other people, or be about one single person.
I took a brief look at
beaglefs and was briefly
impressed that it did not depend on roughly 5 gigabytes of GNOME/Mono, but
then also decided that it's not what I wanted, because it's too
fileystem-centric and I also do not want a hundred mounted pseudo filesystems
in my home directory.
Beagle, on the other
hand, does have half a million dependencies and plugins for almost every other
application that has half a million dependencies, but it's basically unusable
to people who use simple, non-graphical tools for their information
management. I am going to check
strigi-daemon and
doodle, but I don't really
expect any different.
Does anyone know of a high-level tool that I could use to tie together all my
information sources/types?
Then, on to the second feature I want: tags. You know it, tags are web 2.0 and
web 2.0 is sexy and since I want to be sexy, I need tags. They are also
marginally useful and I could use them to place the link the email from
a friend about
Debconf7 to his name, Debian,
the conference, as well as the client we're going to be visiting on the way
back. Or I could associate the slides for my
talk on method diffusion
with Debian, the conference, and my
Ph.D. research. Marginally useful but soooo sexy.
Tags should be hierarchical, such that
foo::bar::baz is a subset of
foo and
foo::bar (and a query for
foo would automatically yield
results for
foo::bar::baz too). Wildcards should be supported, such that
I could search for
foo::+::baz and also find
foo::bla::baz, and of
course you should be able to perform the standard logical functions, such as
AND/OR/NOT on them.
Enrico calls this
"faceted categorisation" and I would never question him on such topics.
I do like the idea of a filesystem, backed by an index, but otherwise using
metadata stored in extended filesystem attributes, which is what BeagleFS
does. However, I'd like it to be ad-hoc, such that the query is not a mount
option, but rather determined by the filesystem
syscalls. For instance,
the directory listing of
/TAGS/foo::bar/ should contain all files tagged
with
foo::bar;
/TAGS/-foo::bar/,
/TAGS/foo::bar,+::baz/, and
/TAGS/foo::+.bla::+/ could be the shell-friendly ways to encode NOT, OR,
and AND.
If you think about it for a minute, then it's actually not that hard and
should be a weekend job to implement on top of
FUSE, but it'll only really work when each
filesystem node corresponds to exactly one entity. Contacts and bookmarks are
trivial to implement that way (VCards and
.lnk files), but e-mail is not:
with the two popular storage backends mailbox and Maildir, an e-mail message
is either a set of lines in a file, or a file in a directrory hierarchy.
At first, Maildir may sound like the ticket, but when you consider that
a message's
new status is encoded in the path and not in the message's
filename or content, while the filename is used to encode other status and
index information, such as
deleted or a message's size, it quickly becomes
a nightmare this is why I consider
mairix to be more or less
unusable other than for quick, one-time searches.
To be able to properly deal with email in the filesystem I am proposing, one
would need to use mailboxes that only ever stored one message (which would be
a waste of space and is not supported by any of dozens of e-mail processing or
reading tools), or a new format that used only extended filesystem attributes
for metadata, never location of a file or its name. And that does not exist
yet, isn't debugged, let alone supported by any tools.
Where to, Lazyweb?
Comments welcome.
NP:
Gazpacho:
When Earth Lets Go
Update: as many have noted, of course I am looking for something like the
semantic web, or closely
related to it however, given the current state of things, that doesn't get us
any further. Also, I don't want any of the Web or social and community stuff
that seems to be an inseperable part of the semantic web or the
OWL. I just want the
semantics for a single-user environment. Thus,
NEPOMUK,
which three people have pointed to, is not what I am looking for.
On the issue of one-mail-per-file, Remi Vanicat pointed me to Gnus'
nnml
storage:
If you use this back end, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files, one
file for each mail, and put the articles into the corresponding directories
under the directory specified by the nnml-directory variable.
As long as
nnml is a Gnus-specific format, it's useless to me. I want to
continue using standard tools like
mutt,
procmail,
formail, and IMAP servers.
