3.8 KiB
Melchior: The First Wiseman
Extracting Information from Data
Melchior is an external memory, a search engine for the facts surrounding your life. You deploy an instance of Melchior, wire up a set of ingester agents to pull information from your surroundings, and then use Melchior to recall information, organize it, and present it for yourself and people around you.
For now, Melchior doesn't have actual releases; it is pre-alpha software, the data model, frontend and backend can change at the whims of the author. If, in spite of these warnings, you want to play with it, you can get it from the author's Gogs instance.
The README document is here. Melchior is named after the first Magi, the biblical wisemen, but also the computers controlling Tokyo-3 in the documentary Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Use Cases
- What page was I looking at that had a reference to Melchior.
- What calendar events do I have today
- What photos did I take while I was in San Diego?
- What restaurant did I go to the last time I was in Tempe?
- Who was I talking to about Ear Plugs on Twitter?
- Where did I store my USB mouse?
- Which e-books do I need to strip the DRM from?
- Who have I sent emails to in the last month?
- When was the last time I ate Burmese food
- Where was I when I took a picture of a truck
- Which calendar event did this page of notes come from
- Which calendar event was I at when I wrote this org-mode entry
Rationale
I am a forgetful person. I also, at any given time, have a pile of projects, plans, and mostly unformed thoughts in my head that get pushed out fairly easily. This suite of software is designed to provide a simple way to pull those things out of my brain and represent them in a way that I can use and find and develop upon.
In the past, and until this suite is useful enough to preempt it, I have been a heavy user of Emacs's Org-mode software, an incredibly powerful outline and journaling system. However, as I try to fit more and more information in to the system, using simple scripts and ingestion systems like Memacs Emacs grinds to a halt and querying the system becomes, essentially, impossible to maintain. Moving more and more of these style of queries out of Emacs and in to a dedicated store is an attempt to mold my system even more towards how my brain works.
I don't plan on ever hosting "shared" instances of Melchior, nor has the software been designed to make this simple. I don't want your data, I don't want you to give me or others your personal lives. Any plan for "monetizing" will either come through sponsorship of feature development, or through efforts to make it simple to self-host Melchior. As such, I've chosen to license the code under a strong copyleft license, the GNU Affero General Public License, which requires anyone hosting this software for others to use to provide the source code to people they are hosting it for. Facilities to enable this easily will be built in to the code at some point in the future, but do keep that in mind if you decide to host a copy of Melchior for others.
Legal Biz
Melchior is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Melchior is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with Melchior. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.