Not sure how to develop a web app upon this

Hi Akul,

Thank you for your interest in using Zeitgeist.

Zeitgeist was originally created as a desktop-wide service (to track everything concerning one particular user). It is certainly possible to use it as a backend for a website, but depending on your needs it may not be the best option. I'm curious, could you share a bit on what's your plan for using it?

You can install the "zeitgeist", apt-get will show you which additional dependencies are required. It shouldn't be much, just some libraries if you don't have them installed already.

As for using it, you can find an example of how it works with Python here: http://bloc.eurion.net/archives/2012/zeitgeist-python-api-tutorial/. For Vala or C, usage is similar. Information about the datamodel is available at http://eurion.net/zeitgeist/docs/0.8.2/datamodel.html, in particular:
 - List of "interpretations" *: http://eurion.net/zeitgeist/docs/0.8.2/ontology.html#symbol-interpretation
 - List of "manifestations" *: http://eurion.net/zeitgeist/docs/0.8.2/ontology.html#symbol-manifestation
(* Those documentation pages are a bit messy at the moment, since they don't separate event and subject interpretations/manfiestations; in general, anything with URL semanticdesktop.org is for subjects and zeitgeist-project.com is for events).

>> You can install the "zeitgeist",
That should have been: You can install the "zeitgeist" package

By the way, note that we are not in any way related to https://launchpad.net/~tzm.

Hi Siegfried, as a backend service, basically the usage tracking of various features to store as user logs - number of checkin, checkouts,users he interacted with, number of posts, posts by tags, posts by categories, etc, etc - some forum like user activites need to be logged/recorded and I thought since we use an ubuntu server why not ask for help here with this framework!
Thanks for those links let me check them out and get back to you for any doubts!

Yup I know its not the php zeitgeist framework or Tzm!

You could re-compile Zeitgeist replacing the ontology with one of your own that's better suited for these types of events, but it'd still be a somewhat forced match.

Zeitgeist wasn't build for the types of queries you'll probably want to make. It could give you lists of {all, most recent} checkins, the most {popular check-in location, user with the most visits, ...} (depending on how you design the ontology), etc. but it doesn't provide any API for eg. counting the number of checkins.

If you really want to you could probably implement some additional method calls, but I think you'd be better of with a standard SQL/NoSQL database solution.

so when someone develops a new ubuntu application and wants to integrate with zeitgeist, do they make a new data model.how do you go about it?
Still not clear with the difference b/w ontology and data models.

Yes I considered using a proper query. before that i would just consider if this could be done with this framework.

 It could give you lists of {all, most recent} checkins, the most {popular check-in location, user with the most visits, ...}
thats exactly what I want.

>> so when someone develops a new ubuntu application and wants to integrate
>> with zeitgeist, do they make a new data model.how do you go about it?

Nope, they use the existing one. But in your case you have multiple users, etc. which is not what Zeitgeist was designed for.

>> Still not clear with the difference b/w ontology and data models.

They are the same, essentially.

Basically the problem is that there's only a certain number of ways you can query, so depending on how you store the data there is some things you can query and some you can't. Another solution would give you more flexibility there.

Maybe it would work out for what you want, that'd be cool. But it isn't something I've given much thought.

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