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[[!meta title=“Points of View”]]
[[!toc]]
Non-Technical / Simple User
Applications will be integrated much better. If you switch from one music player to another, your playlists and favorites and ratings and radio channels will be available in the new player. Integration is possible without Rel4tion, but its tools for building and sharing vocabularies will make it easier, and hopefully widespread.
With a shared desktop datastore, real-time integration will be possible too. An e-mail reader application can receive a new e-mail containing an invitation to an event. When the event is inserted into the datastore, it will trigger the calendar application, which will ask whether to remind you about it and let you insert some notes. This will be possible even if the e-mail and calendar applications were written separately by different people, as long as they share their data schemas (which is what Rel4tion exists for).
You’ll also get much more powerful information access. Imagine having a folder containing films, in the form of video files. How can you filter films by genre, or by actor, or by release date? You need a dedicated application for that. Suppose you install it, but then one day you want to get a list of the films you watched already, liked them, but it was at least a year ago. The application happens not to record when you watched films, or keep ratings - it just counts the times you watched. You try to find another application which does do that… but it lacks things you had in the first one. Isn’t that frustrating? And when you need some custom, less usual query, neither support it.
With Rel4tion, and some helpers built on top of it, you’ll be able to get all this information without any dedicated application. Just open your information browser (say, an equivalent to a file browser) and enter the query. You can even add custom properties of films, which no application supports yet, and then send them to developers and ask them to consider your ideas. Until they do, you can already use them and tag your files and information in any creative ways you wish.
Technical / Curious / Adventurous User
Using the programming and scripting interfaces available, you’ll be able to write simple scripts and applications which deal with specific kinds of information.
You’ll be able to write data documents, experiment with vocabularies and enrich your desktop with new functionality using them. It will even make it possible to make existing applications share information, and communicate through data manipulations.