Semantic Desktop integration discussion.

We are modeling our new, better version of gnowsis integration.

introduction: an adpater is a thing that converts existing metadata to 
RDF. see adapter javadoc 
<http://www.gnowsis.org/statisch/javadoc/org/gnowsis/data/adapter/Adapter.html>
this has been blogged here: http://leobard.twoday.net/stories/377397/

Adapters are today:
- Perl and Python scripts that scratch data from sources (which is ok)

but this is hard on reuse and integration to a bigger view. We want to 
reuse adapters made by others.
(like I heard rumor that kowari includes another mp3 adapter to extract 
metadata from mp3s. well, then we have the gnowsis mp3 adapter, the 
kowari, and thousands of others...)

The questions are
- how to access adapters
- how does a adapter publish its metadata. Metadata of adapters are: 
What data do I contain?
- how to implement adapters (we have much experience from adapting 
outlook and mp3 and other stuff like imap)
- what messages should be passed back and forth?

our answers ´would be:
adapters are running as servers. accessed through xml/rpc, soap, or pure 
http.
adapters publish their metadata as RDF model, rdf/xml
adapters can be implemented in any language, as long as they speak some 
http-speak.
messages would be RDQL and ChattyBoundedDescriptions

why this "web service" approach?
because it is a better step to the so called "networked semantic 
desktop" (which i am trying to hack, anyhow :-)
all p-2-p services use http servers to publish data (even iTunes does) 
so we could stick to this.

greetings
Leo