In reply to interesting comments to my previous blog on Strigi and xAttr support in KDE4, I would like to suggest the following mockups, which I would find very useful. The deal with the ability to store keywords, for example, not but necessarily using xAttr. I have no idea on how to implement these mockups, so any help or pointers are appreciated.

The first plot is an example of how these keyword markup could be used in KDE, other than searching itself. When showing the properties of a directory in KDE, it would show an overview of hottest keywords for that directory, such as used on social bookmark website like Technorati too:

This example shows that the keyword ‘Strigi’ was used much inside the index_files directory (they are not just the keywords given for that directory, but a summary of the directory content!). Now, these keywords could be stored as xAttr, but in a database too. The first requires a filesystem that supports xAttr, while the second requires a database daemon to be running. However, for speed performance reasons this would be required anyway. Strigi indexes xAttr now (post 0.3.0 release), and basically allows both.

Independent of the chosen/prefered way to store keywords, these keywords can be edited from the Properties dialog:

Now comes the tricky part: though I would like to add this to KDE, I do not have the C++/KDE experience to actually do this. I’m already happy that I was able to extend the Strigi with support for KDE’s kfile architecture. Yes, the Strigi version in SVN will index all metadata extractable with kfile plugins installed on the KDE installation.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2006/06/kde4-keyword-support-mockups.html.