What is, and Who is behind, GLScube

July 23rd, 2006

A little bit of history for those interested to know.

GLScube started as an idea between four people, namely, Ahmed Salama, Ahmed Samih, Amr Ramadan and Karim M. Yousef. All of us are (to be accurately, it is now “were”) students of Computer Engineering at the Alexandria University of Egypt. The idea was simple, we wanted to bring metadata, content and relational-based storage, organization and searching to GNU/Linux. We saw what Apple was doing with Spotlight, what Microsoft was doing with WinFS, what researchers have been doing for the past twenty years or so, and we were immediately hooked to the idea.

The reason for us being interested in a new idea for storage, organization and searching is that we felt that hierarchical organization, well, sucks! Thus, we went on to investigate researches that tackled this point. To our surprise, it wasn’t few. We read through many papers that dated as far as the late 80’s that presented alternatives to hierarchical organization.

“There are a number of usability problems to be overcome to the retrieval side that occur as a result of the inability to place documents into more than one category. Using a hierarchical system, the user is bound to a static organization scheme. Hence, he or she cannot view the information using a different scheme during retrieval than what was used when the information was initially organizaed.” (Quan et al in ‘User Interfaces for Supporting Multiple Categorization‘)

That was in summer, and after researching and digging in the past, we decided to continue work on this subject as our Graduation Project from the University. We worked on this under the supervision of Prof. M. A. Ismail, whose Doctoral is in Image Processing and Information Retrieval. From this point on things are pretty well documented in our Design Documentation, available at www.glscube.org. This chapter of the story ended with our presentation of the project and grabbing an “Excellent” degree for it (Excellent = As High As It Gets). Today, we are still working on it, and we plan on doing so.
So, that is some little info about who is behind GLScube, and a little bit of introduction of how it came to be. In later posts, I will dicuss what GLScube actually is, and where it is going to.

Entry Filed under: General