In 2006 at GUADEC Joe Shaw demonstrated Beagle, the first 40 seconds of the video are here no idea where to find the rest? That’s not what I’m wondering about though, Joe demonstrated something called the relationship browser, briefly, and he thought it was useless to any real developers…
I’ve been thinking about this bit of code for a while, its been at the back of my mind as I see it as something which isn’t only useful but would be very helpful in understanding the relationships between peoples documents, and thus help in things like semantic desktop etc… I’m not sure how it worked, I’m not sure what features it had but from what I saw it could be an interesting bit of functional code to play with.
So I’m making a plea, to anyone at Novell that can get this code published. Its not a matter of the code solving all of our problems, but a brief demonstration of it inspired an idea that’s continued to fester in my mind… The idea is growing, and more and more people are thinking in similar terms. I’d really like to see this code out there, just because its code and we don’t like to keep things secret in this community 
, it probably doesn’t have any value other than good reference material and a possible research tool, but I think that should be enough for Novell to give it away…
Update: I’m going to cry, Joe says no code 
Inspiring as it was, and Joe I didn’t want to bother you personally as you had left Novell some time ago, thanks at least for the screen shot… I suppose my fishing expedition is over… At least the idea has been renewed, and you’ve made a good point about the beagle/tracker communities… We do need better apps built on this stuff 
Jikes!!!
http://joeshaw.org/association-browser.png is IMHO a perfect example of why graphics artists should stick to graphics and leave the interaction design to the interaction designers.
@Martin, you’ve totally missed the point about what this represents, you have to think a little out of the box for it but regardless of the designs the way the data moves within is most important.
The main missing piece is dashboard… wot begat beagle in the first place… oh dashboard, where art thou… our once future gnome, abandoned and bitrotting in the ditch.
Still, I hear there is a macosx port that uses accessability features to get the data it needs instead of the (more elegant) clue packets… maybe somebody will port it one day
@Stu, dashboard is a cool idea, and a cool application, and has great relevancy in what it is I’m thinking through.
Its about information gathering meets representation. When a lot of people are saying the desktop is dead, I want to make it live, in a Boris Karloff kinda way
Agreed that this would have been wonderful to see come to fruition. On that note, I’m still waiting for Soylent to get integrated into Gnome. Oh the daydreams I could have of wonderful, easy-to-navigate communication and documentation.