Collaboration with AbiWord on Dashbaord/Beagle?

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

Hi everyone,
            I've been lurking on this list for while. I would like to
present the following project as possible collaboration
between the Abiword, Beagle and Dashboard projects for
Google's Summer Of Code.

About 1.5 years ago I wrote the AbiDash plugin for Abiword which sends
clues and notifications to the dashboard program. As far as I can tell the
clue packets get transmitted correctly but unfortunately Dashboard fell
into a state of bitrot so I never got the chance to see how well it
worked. Julian Satchel picked up the plugin and did something with a
competing backend to beagle. Unfortunately that work was all
commercial-in-confidence so I never saw if that worked either.

My vision was that if a user is employing AbiWord to write an essay on
say, Shakespear's Midsummer Night, the dashboard program would search
through the users documents looking for both relevent documents and
relevent parts of the documents to what is being typed and present the
user with useful information without the user having to do any explicit
searchs. So I imagined relevent parts of the "Midsummer's Night's dream"
or relevent commentries from other sources appearing in dashboard as the
user wrote their essay. Or if I'm writin a technical paper I get
references to previous work in dashboard and along with useful facts from
source documents as I type in AbiWord.

So I'm very happy to help on the AbiWord side. As I said, the plugin to
send notifications from Abiword to dashboard has been written. No doubt it
will need a lot of tweaking and fixing. Is there interest in
Beagle/Dashboard community to help Mentor on the Dashboard side?

I've also proposed this project as our first choice in Abiword's SoC
application to Google.

Cheers

Martin