GNOME and advanced search indexes viability

["Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)" <amadorm usm edu ec>]

Hey everyone, and sorry for the Jello (crosspost),

I'm representing a a couple of students. We are on the verge of starting 
a college project, aimed at world do... er.. at the development of a 
software solution.  We thought it would be a good idea to develop a 
software tool to assist users in the eternal quest for finding their own 
documents in their document mess.  Key to this is the creation of an 
index that will contain all information, automatically and customly 
extracted from each document.  This index will be extensible, won't 
impact system performance, and will attempt to be secure.

Here's the thing: this project obligatorily has to be a commercial 
endeavor.  Note the use of the word "commercial" rather than 
"proprietary".  We've done a quick market segmentation and identified 
two target groups: a SOHO OSS consumer and a corporate commercial 
customer, each with different needs.  Needlessly to say, I'm exposing 
this because the project will be based on UNIX/Linux (what's the point 
of competing with Microsoft Indexing Service?).

We intend to FLOSS a consumer-level tool based on our technology, in 
order to push it to become the de-facto standard (don't worry, it will 
also use de iure standards as well) for Linux distributions.  We also 
will cater to commercial interests with enhanced versions of our 
products.  We're trying to be good citizens and provide great 
technology, and get rich (hey, what's wrong with that! ;-).  I recognize 
there's a similar thing called Medusa, in spirit.  I assure you our 
software will have greater capabilities and will take corporate 
customers and large networks into account.

So, two questions:

* to any of the GNOME file search or core developers: do you consider 
feasible that the standard GNOME search tool uses our index in addition 
to the standard file search method?  I mean, that if we or anyone else 
provides the patches to connect this to our data/metadata index, it gets 
incorporated into mainline GNOME.  We'd hate to provide an 
unintegrated-with-GNOME search tool.
* to any of the corporate GNOME users: would you be interested in an 
index for your network/company which indexes your SAMBA/NFS shares and 
lets your users quickly locate any document in the network?  what would 
such a tool need for you to begin using it? 

I beg interested people please respond to my private e-mail (as well as 
the GNOME lists if you see fit).  It's critical for the project that 
both regular users/developers and corporate customers are interested.  
Otherwise we will end up doing YAWVBAS (yet another windows/visual basic 
accounting software) and scrambling to get a customer.  And we'd love to 
see an OSS version of our software benefit everyone, and GNOME to 
integrate with it.

What say you?

   good luck!

   Manuel Amador
   Universidad Santa Marķa
   Dynex division

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