[Tracker] GSOC Project Idea

[Sumit Ranjan <sumit nitt gmail com>]

Hi all..

I am Sumit, third year Computer Science student from India. I am very much enthusiastic about contributing for gnome, in google SoC'10. I have come up with a project idea, which I wish to work on.

Description: I would like to develop a "User friendly Command Search Tool" which gives users facility to search for a specific command offline. The user can give a text input related to the command. The tool will generate a list of commands with description, sorted based on relevance.
Currently, to search for a command we can do man -k or apropos or whatis , which searches for keywords in a set of database files containing short description of system commands and displays the result in standard output. But the results obtained are plenteous or sometimes empty and are alphabetically sorted. So it becomes very painful to find the expected command.
Take for an example,
    when I search for "list content of directories"         ==> empty result
                              "file compression"                     ==> empty result
                              "compression"                          ==> 15 results(not sorted by relevance)
Benefits: This tool can be very  useful for newbies who are not familiar with linux commands. In such cases they have to google to get the command they want. But in case of offline users they have no choice but to look into linux reference manuals.

To Do:  1) Ranking the results based on relevance (developing a ranking algorithm)
            2) Making a GUI for the tool, which displays the results in a user friendly manner, categorizing the results.
            3) Use data from linux forums to estimate the popularity and usage of command.
            4) Do natural language processing of the input text, to give good search results.

These are  my initial thoughts of my idea. I would very much appreciate, if I could receive some feedback on my idea and whether this can be feasible for google SoC proposal. I am also looking for mentors, who might be interested in this idea.

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With regards,
Sumit Ranjan