GNOME Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist

Please note that the Zeitgeist team is currently discussing major project changes. Please check back in a few days for an announcement regarding future project plans.

Overview

Zeitgeist is a Service that logs acitvites on you computer. Gnome Zeitgeist is a tool for easily browsing and finding files based on acitvites on your computer.

Code

The code is currently hosted at launchpad at https://launchpad.net/~gnome-doc-centric-playground. You can grab a copy of the branch with bzr branch lp:gnome-doc-centric-playground

Some parts of the code are based on Gimmie/Mayanna

Use cases

John turns on his computer to work on his seminar paper. Instead of digging through his hierarchal file system, he simply opens up Gnome Zeitgeist and clicks on the top item in the “Recently Used Files” list. When he realizes that he can’t remember the name of the website that he was reading for research yesterday, he simply looks at the list of files related to his paper and clicks on the website.

Grouping and Filtering

Our goal is to group/filter the data by:

  • Type of data
  • Source
  • Time
  • Name
  • Tags
  • Neighbouring Data
  • Comments
  • Location of use (GPS)

Features

Dataproviders:

  • Gtk.RecentlyUsed (Videos, Music, Docs, etc.)

  • Firefox 3 History
  • Tomboy Notes

Current features:

  • Browse activites
  • Drag and Drop (not for links)
  • Look at old version of documents and source files ( only available for items logged after the first use)
  • Tagging
  • Searching
  • Filtering

TODO

Backend Sprints

  • When importing Firefox history, automatically tag websites with firefox and/or delicious tags. (Note: It may make sense to look into integration with the Online Desktop project, which is already capable of handling account details for online services.)
  • Add support for GPS filtering and mapping.
  • Evolution integration.
  • Add logged pidgin chats into the database. (They’re stored in ~/.purple/logs)

GUI Sprints

  • Show all images on any day in a thumbnail grid.
  • Add an actions toolbar to quickly share items by email or instant messaging. (See nautilus-share)

Architecture

  • Experiment with Tracker, Soylent, and Empathy.
  • Use an RDF based backend to allow better semantic metadata. (E.g. Automatically tag files edited at a given time with the name of the Hamster project that was worked on at the same time.)

Long term goals

  • Better metadata extraction (see some of the sprints above)
  • Integration with other computers and mobile devices.

Video

Zeitgeist video

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