Strigi news

On Saturday 2008-01-12 we had a meeting on Strigi. 23 people were logged into the meeting that lasted for two hours.
Starting from a status document, we discussed the deficiencies of the current Strigi version.

On Saturday 12 January at 17 UTC an irc meeting will take place on #strigi channel (it's on freenode if you don't know).
During the meeting Strigi developers will discuss about the future developments of Strigi.

Special guest: Aaron Aseigo.

You're all welcome.

Today Strigi 0.5.7 has been released.

This is the changelog:

• use plugins instead of shared libraries for the indexer backends
• lots of bugfixes and cleanups
• allow backends to be used in RAM by using ':memory:' as the index name

As Xesam implementation is stabilizing, Strigi is about to make a next step towards semantic desktop.

Nepomuk-KDE developer Sebastian Trueg said he will release shortly his RDF code as a storage and indexer backend for Strigi. This means Strigi has wider choice of backends, namely RedLand(SQLite-based) and Sesame2(Native RDF storage).

Benefits include SPARQL query support, and in case of Sesame2, a much better performance especially for complex queries.

SPARQL support comes handy considering very limited capabilities of Xesam query language.

Saturday, June 30th Jos van den Oever (Strigi's creator) give a presentation at aKademy 2007.

You can find a video of his talk here.

Good job Jos!

Xesam ontology is shaping up nicely. It had gotten much more flexible and powerful than I thought I could ever entice desktop indexers to implement.

Unfortunately Xesam query interface in Strigi will not be finished before aKademy as I hoped, but it's not far from completion(days away). I feel it's a fair price to pay for a boost in functionality :)

Query interface implementation will be used to fine-tune ontology.

aKademy 2007 starts on the 30th of June. I'm honored to give a talk there on the progress of Strigi and it's use within KDE4.
Till then, I want to achieve some goals to have a nice Strigi version to work with and to show off while at aKademy.

Here's a list of things that should be done by then:

• Minimal Xesam implementation
• strigicmd nicely working for index management
• All unit tests passing
• No more bugs

This should be doable, because most of the ambitious stuff is already in there and working. Now we need to make this power accessible to power users via strigicmd. In addition, Xesam support is important. This young effort to standardize on a common ontology and search query format for the free desktop search programs out there, is very important.

Within several days Strigi ontology will be integrated with Xesam. Xesam is going to be the core of Strigi with extensions if/where necessary. I'll do my best to the most useful ideas from all participating Indexers and Nepomuk draft specification into Xesam core. Stay tuned.

You can find a small guide for building Strigi on a fresh installation of Kubuntu feisty fawn.
The guide can be applied also to other debian-based system.

You can find it here.

The new version of Strigi, 0.5.1, has been released. We have worked long on this release and it contains many improvements.
- API cleanup because KDE4 is now using Strigi
- new analyzer models that make it easier to write plugins for text, xml and binary files
- multithreading support for indexing
- inheritance in the field properties
- better documentation
- native support for microsoft office and pdf
- removal of many dependencies