GNOME and advanced search indexes viability



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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