extending Nautilus metadata with tags (or keywords)

[Sébastien Barthélemy <barthelemy crans org>]

Hello everybody, 

for my work (I'm a PhD student), I have to manage a lot of pdf/ps.gz
files, reading them, sorting them and taking notes about them. I found
no software to do this, but maybe Nautilus could help.

What I would like is quite simple: 
* attach to each file some annotations while I read the file,
* attach to each file some keywords to filter the nautilus view.

For the first point, the "note" property panel is perfect, except the
fact that I'd like it to be more accessible (through the left panel, for
instance)

As all my files are in the same directory, all the metadata will be in
the same xml file (in .nautilus/...), this is convenient.

Therefore, for the second point, it would be required to add a metadata
field (keywords) to the nautilus ones, and add ways to view and change
it (columns in the list view, emblems).
It will also be required to provide some way to filter the view, with
regexp, checkboxes or so (maybe beagle or tracker could do this work for
me).

I've read the nautilus-internals pdf, but I cannot figure out if what I
just explained would require lots of work or not.
I also had a look at python-nautilus, but it seems that I won't be able
to add the fields within python-nautilus.

What do you think about that ?
does it seem realistic to add this keyword support as a nautilus
extension ? Or do you see a better way to do this ?

Thanks a lot for any hint and don't hesitate to send me back reading
documentation instead of making long answers

-- 
Sebastien Barthelemy