FOSDEM 2005: Desktop Search Interview

The schedule for the KDE developers room talks at FOSDEM is now online. Our final interview with the speakers is with Scott Wheeler who will be giving a talk titled "KDE 4: Beyond Hierarchical Data, The Desktop as a Searchable Web of Context". FOSDEM is this weekend, see you there.

Please introduce yourself and your role in KDE.

I feel like I've been asked this question enough times that I should have an exciting answer by now. But well, I wrote JuK and TagLib as well as a couple of other small applications in KDE CVS and do some work on a handful of things in kdelibs and elsewhere across KDE.

What kind of search capabilities do you think a modern desktop should have?

Well, I think I'd like to step back a bit first and look a little at the problem — and the problem isn't a lack of a search tool, the problem is that it's hard to find things. Search tool or no, all of the ideas flow from the idea of solving the problem rather than just creating a new tool. So, in a sense, I don't think a modern desktop should have a search tool; I think a modern desktop should make it easy to find stuff — we're then left with how to get there.

And I suppose with all of the buzz around search tools these days people have a much more concrete idea in mind when they hear about searching on the desktop. But such wasn't the case when I started kicking these ideas around a while back. Spotlight was announced a few days after I'd submitted my abstract for the KDE Developer's conference, Beagle was relatively low profile, Google for the Desktop and its successors hadn't entered the scene yet, etc.

So, I think — fundamentally "what sort of search should the desktop have" is almost the wrong question. "How should we make it easier to work with the data we accumulate on the desktop?" is closer to the right question. I think search is just part of the answer.

Where did the idea of integrating a search capability throughout KDE come from?

Well, a few things actually. It mostly came from not being able to find things and asking some fundamental questions about how we organize and access information on the desktop. The first step — and this is tied up with the first part of the name of both this talk (which is related to the one that I gave at Linux Bangalore) and the one at the KDE conference this summer — is that hierarchical interfaces simply don't make sense in a lot of cases.

When I started looking around for examples of how this had played out in other domains of information, the most obvious example was the World Wide Web, where we've already moved from hierarchical interfaces to search based interfaces. It seemed logical that we could learn from that metaphor.

On the technical side of things I'd just written the listview search line class (used in JuK) that's now fairly prevalent in KDE that makes filtering of information in lists much easier, so that played into things too.

What do you think of other search tools such as GNOME's Beagle and Google's Desktop Search?

Well, they're fundamentally different in scope. Again, right now the term "desktop search" actually means something; that wasn't really true when I started working on these ideas this summer. So while there are some things in common, they're really pretty different approaches.

Beagle, Spotlight, Google for the Desktop, and their relatives are more interested in static indexing and search through that information. That's kind of where I was at conceptually early this summer when I coded the first mock-up. Since then however the ideas have moved on quite a bit and I think we've actually got something rather more interesting up our proverbial sleeves. (I should note however that I think the Beagle group is doing fine work, but it's something pretty different from what I'm interested in.)

The first difference is that this is a framework, not a tool. Beagle has some elements of this, but it's still not integrated into the core of the desktop. Google for the Desktop is mostly just a standalone tool from what I know of it. Honestly I think it's really below the level of innovation that I tend to expect from Google.

What we're now looking for in the KDE 4 infrastructure is a general way of linking information and storing contextual information — that information can come from meta-data, usage patterns, explicit relationships and a host of other places.

There won't be a single interface to this set of contextual information; we'll provide some basic APIs for accessing the components in KDE applications, but we're quite interested in seeing what application authors will think to do with it. Really I think they'll surprise us.

We're looking at everything from reorganizing KControl to make search and related items and usage patterns more prevalent to annotating mails or documents with notes to reworking file dialogs. Really the scope is pretty broad.

Do you think Free Software solutions from KDE and GNOME can compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft?

Sure. I mean — I don't think the ability to compete with commercial players is significantly different with desktop search than it is with other components of the desktop. And honestly I think we've kind of got a head start here.

Has there been any progress on planning or coding search into KDE yet? Is anyone helping you? What problems are you facing?

There have been a number of cycles through some API and database design sketches. But right now we tend to write code and as soon as it's done we've realized the flaws in it and start rewriting. This will probably continue for a while, but I think we'll be able to have something pretty useful in KDE 4.

There are a number of folks involved in discussion of these issues from various sub-projects inside of KDE. Thusfar it's been mostly myself and Aaron Seigo banging on the API, but others have contributed to the discussions.

I think the biggest problem that we're dealing with is moving from the abstract set of ideas that we're working with into real APIs — trying to keep things general enough to stay as extensible as we'd like them to be, but not so lofty that they're convoluted and useless.

What technologies do you plan on using, e.g. which database?

Well, we've gravitated towards Postgres, but mostly because of licensing. Other than that, well, uhm, we're using Qt. The Qt 4 SQL API seems much improved, so I've kind of been mentally stalling on really finishing up the current code until I can just work with that since otherwise everything would just have to be rewritten in a few weeks.

Is the KDE search tool likely to be cross desktop compatible so we could have a common base with Gnome?

Well, again, this really isn't about a "KDE search tool" -- and the chances of it being GNOME compatible out of the box aren't particularly high. That said, as the data store will just be a Postgres database and ideally we won't have to use too many complex serialized types, there wouldn't be a reason that a GNOME frontend couldn't be written. But generally speaking I'd like to get the technology laid down and then see if we can convince others to adopt it rather than the other way around.

What does the project need most now?

Time. And I mean that in a few ways — we need time to finish fleshing out the ideas, time to let the stuff mature inside of KDE and well, the couple of us working on it could use more time for such. But really as most of the framework for things like metadata collection and whatnot are already inside of KDE this won't be a huge project from the framework side. What will take a good while will be porting over applications to use it where appropriate.