Manually added Metadata and App-Integration

DEVONthink Feedback
1

Hi folks of the DT community,

i am new here, so please excuse if i am repeating obvious or redundant information. I have been searching the forums, but did not find, what i am about to write.

I have two major questions and would love to have your oppinion and may be also some comment on the likelyhood of such features being introduced in DevonThink.

Le me start by saying, that i am using this software for a very short time only, but i already put many hours of work into it. At the moment i am writing a technical book, so i need to arrange many hundreds of resources.

DT does that very well and i am very pleased with it.

There are however two major fields of functuionality that i am missing dearly:

  1. Metadata
    It would be extremely helpful for me to be able to configure metadata-sets for each group. For example, i could use a set consisting of: date (not creation of the file on my harddrive, but when the document was written) author(s), keywords, description, copyright, archive date, citation name (Reagan, Ronald.: Evil Empire Speech, held at, published by, publisher, year, pages). Now, i would not like to have presets from the producers of Dt, but rather a tool to create meta-data forms to my requirements.
    Some free-for-all Unix tools allow for metadata extraction and make suggestions (especially for Dublin Core) or find out the language of a document, if there was a plugin API, this could be easily extended by third party developers and give the product more thrust.

It would be important, that these metadata can be searched and will also be included in your analysis tools.

In a future step a view showing inference like a hyperbolic tree (or ideagraph) would be very welcome.

  1. Integration
    a. Finder:
    May be i am missing something, but i would prefer having a fourth mode for the import settings, that of managing files entirely through DT. MS is planning that for the next Windows version, where a DB will be intermediating between user and file-system. I think it is very important to reduce redundancy.
    Practically this means, that i can configure DT to create folders and move data around reflecting the semantic order created in the browser.

b. Safari and Mail.App
I would be very thankful, if it was possible to drag any url or Email to the DT-icon in the Dock, which then allows it to place the item in any of the groups, just like in a folder.

I also support the requests made for the integration of Ontolgies for orders and influencing the matching logic. From what i have seen in projects like Ontobrowser, this does seem to be a valid option, no problem with performance there.

thanks for listening and again, excuse me, if have wasted your time on previously discussed matters.

cheers

Daniel

2

Daniel,

thank you for the feedback & the suggestions.

  1. DEVONthink Pro 2.0 will support configurable metadata (the initial release coming next month will be v1.8.2 and v2.0 should be available in Q3/04).

2a. Maybe we’ll add this in a future release but at the moment the job of DEVONthink is not yet to be a Finder replacement.

2b. This is unfortunately not possible due to limitations of the Dock (this thing accepts only existings files and folders, nothing else).

3

Hi Christian,

thanks for your reply. I am very much looking forward to the metadata-integration.

I have made up my mind about the finder integration.
I think one can do without if the pad-idea is implemented and if there is such a thing as "watched" folder (like in adobe acrobat) which can be configured per group.

Another way of integrating the groups with the dock would be to create a DAV access possibility to your database, replicating the groups as folders. Then, if Apache with mod_dav is running and the mountpoint is mounted, it can be placed in the dock and would spring open like a regular folder.

for an example using DAV to database access, see:
collaboratory.emsl.pnl.gov/sam/S … dec02.html

and many others.

Not exactly a light-weight solution to the problem, but on the way to creating a web-frontend for DT it might fit in nicely.

best regards,

Daniel

4

Daniel,

there will two possibilities in the future:

  1. The "Synchronize" command to synchronize the contents of your database and those of your filesystem

  2. "Folder links" retrieving the contents of the linked folder automatically everytime the folder is expanded/displayed.

And WebDAV will probably come some day but neither DT PE nor DT Pro will get this feature.

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Me, too. :slight_smile: