An order for human beings

[FiableDotBiz]

Hello.

In 19th century libraries, books were usually ordered by size: big books, medium-sized books and small books, in order to save place in shelves. Topic was only a second-level criterion. Now, books are ordered according to the human mind: by topic.
At the beginning of the 21st century, files are still ordered by format: e-mails in a folder (and its sub-folders), web bookmarks in the web browser folder (and if you use several browsers, you have as many bookmarks files), Gramps files in the Gramps folder (Gramps is a genealogical application), html pages in the folder served by Apache etc.. Mageia even propose to save separately "Documents", "Downloads", "Music", "Video" and "Templates" (I don't know exactly what is this for.).
Unfortunately, this is not the way my brain works. When I trace my genealogy, I need at once the e-mails sent by my uncle about this, some web pages, my Gramps database, the photos of my relatives and the notes I wrote myself. But these things are not together. When I make a website for a client, I need the files he sent to me ordered by me, the files I produced or modified myself, the e-mails the client sent to me, some web pages, the CMS files. But these things are not together.

Admittedly, in Thunderbird, you can detach a file from the mail, but if you rename it or move it, it is not accessible from Thunderbird any more. In linux, you can also make symbolic links, but, if you rename or move the file, the link gets broken.

What I dream to see one day is a hierarchy by topic, so that I access in one directory or pseudo-directory all the files related to a topic: web bookmarks, e-mails, database, documents etc.. I would also like followed files (or "monitored files"? I don't know the best English phrase), i.e. that the symbolic links and files addresses inside an application like Thunderbird would automatically update.

So what about working on that for Mageia 7?

[doktor5000]

So what about working on that for Mageia 7?

Feel free to contribute to Mageia by working on that topic

For what's already available, you might want to check out Nepomuk, that's what KDE calls sematic desktop:
https://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk
It allows you to tag your files, and search via different levels of context information.

Sorry, but I don't know what other desktop environments like GNOME have to offer that provides a similar function,
but IIRC they have Zeitgeist and Tracker that do a similar job.

Apart from that, there are indexers like e.g. recoll that allow you to index your files and other objects.
http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

[jiml8]

Nepomuk is working pretty well these days. It has taken quite awhile to get it to this point, but it is actually becoming useful.