Welcome to Yadoda!
A use case
It's easier for me to try to introduce you to Yadoda by means of a trivial example. Suppose you are skilled chess player who wants to learn more on chess: so far you are collecting lots of digital documents on chess, grabbed from specialized internet web sites. Documents may be pdf files describing tactics or history of chess, movie records of old matches, computer algorithms, etc. Till now, you have downloaded several thousand files but, apart from a simple directory catalogation, your set of documents lacks of structure. Moreover, your documents are too many to keep track of duplicated ones and it's coming too difficult to take the right document out of the heap. You need something that can easily describe your documents without waiting for each one to be opened by the right application. Finally, it would be useful for you to organize your documents in a more flexible hierarchy, maybe by means of semantic relationships. What if even all this could be done automatically?
What is it?
Yadoda stands for Yet Another Document Oriented Desktop Application, and I think this is the ever seen longest acronym. Shortly, it's a personal digital library, a tool that tries to keep your documents organized as best as possibile. Unlike other applications that are specific for some kind of files, Yadoda supports all possible file types: pdf, postscripts, mp3, ogg, images, movies and so on. The keyword is neither file, nor filesystem, but document: that's why we say it's document oriented. Documents are enriched with meta-data, structured informations such as the names of the authors, the date a paper has been published on, the number of pages, the lenght of a song and everything regarding documents that is valuable for the user. Documents are organized in a user defined ontology, a hierarchical model of categories/names with some meaning for the user. Yadoda differs from other similar applications (one of which is Beagle) since user can create semantic relationships between documents and use them to navigate through the catalog. User can perform different kind of searches: as an example, one can search all the documents that have a certain author in common, or all of the records regarding a certain chess player. Yadoda has a sort of web crawler that monitors web sites looking for new or updated documents (search is done on a keywords and filetype basis). By default user operates manually, but the application behaviour can be expanded with plugins that can be used to automatically:
- find out relationships between documents of the catalog;
- extract meta-data;
- decide which category a document should be inserted into;
- discover duplicated documents;