Announcing Wasabi – Unifying Desktop Search
I’ve held back the announcement of my prime FOSS activity the last few months… Until last night. Last night I emailed the Gnome, KDE, XDG, and XFCE developers the following announcement. It’s edited slightly to be more bloggy and less emailish.
* In Short
Wasabi is new project with the goal of creating a unified, platform independent, specification and api for desktop search engines (and later metadata services). We have worked together with several search-projects and now have a proposal ready for public evaluation. Now we need feedback from the actual consumers – the application developers.
* Providing Feedback:
I suggest you start by reading the proposal at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/WasabiAbout 
Post any feedback on the relevant thread on the mailinglists[1], or just email me directly (that would be mikkel kamstrup on gmail). I shall try to the best of my effort to answer any questions, but have patience with me if I’m flooded (there are four big mailing lists involved here). In the case I can’t find time to answer everyone I promise that your voice will still be heard and taken into serious consideration before we finalize anything. The public evaluation period ends at 2007-03-06 (one month from now).
* About Wasabi
Wasabi is currently going on at the xdg mailing list at freedesktop.org. As already stated it is an effort to create a unified framework for desktop search- and metadata services. Our first target will be search part of things, but it has ties into the metadata part that we will attend to as soon as the search spec is stabilizing (fx. like standardizing metadata filed names).
The apis will be dbus apis that is both suitable for “direct use” and bindings for your favorite toolkit. Where appropriate we will adopt known standards, but also keep in mind that we are defining a desktop specification and not a spec for generic database servers in networked environments (there are several of these already).
The search spec was created with input from various projects including Tracker, Strigi, Beagle, Pinot and Recoll. I would specifically like to thank Magnus Bergman for his very insightful comments.
* FOSDEM 2007
I will be doing a talk on Wasabi in Brussels at FOSDEM2007. At that time we’ll still be in the evaluation period for the search spec.
[1] desktop-devel-list@gnome.org, xfce4-dev@foo-project.org, kde-devel@kde.org , xdg@lists.freedesktop.org