I've got a plan for dealing with metadata this year. It's not firm on dates, or priorities. I have a list of changes, and I'll tackle them as they seem most urgent or most beneficial. The general summary of tasks is, integrate with nautilus, make Storage with with libgda, add metadata handling to libstorage-translators, and make Storage the metadata backend.

The first things I'm doing are:

1. Make Medusa return the full set of meta data so apps like Nautilus don't need to crawl the file systems and do mime-type lookups.
2. Restore Medusa to Nautilus using using the Nautilus extension API, add simple search to the browser toolbar, and create a complex search side bar.
3. Abstract (is that verb?) the Storage DB and create a libgda facade.
4. Add metadata handling to libstorage-translators, and a means to chain them together to do consecutive processing.
5. Replace the Medusa DB with a metadata library over Storage.