[Tracker] Some thoughts regarding the Tracker website...

[Aleksander Morgado <aleksander lanedo com>]

Hi all,

I just spent 30 mins trying to explain to a friend what Tracker is, and
found out that the Tracker project website doesn't help much...



1) The About (main) page of the Tracker website says:

        "What is Tracker? Tracker is a search engine and that allows the
        user to find their data as fast as possible. Users can search
        for their files and search for content in their files too."

Although we then talk about a semantic data storage and such, I guess we
should not define Tracker just as a "search engine" so that users can
search for their files and content in the files. That's just FTS in
Tracker, and that can even be disabled.

http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/index.html

The "What is it?" text in the NEWS of each version has actually a much
better definition of what Tracker is, we should move it to the front
page of the website:

        "Tracker is a semantic data storage for desktop and mobile
        devices. 
        Tracker uses W3C standards for RDF ontologies using Nepomuk with
        SPARQL to query and update the data.
        
        Tracker is a central repository of user information, that
        provides two big benefits for the user; shared data between
        applications and 
        information which is relational to other information (for
        example: 
        mixing contacts with files, locations, activities and etc.)."
        
We do not even mention "search" in that definition.



2) The "Features" page then lists FTS features and file notifications in
the first section of the page, Technologies. I also believe this is
going to keep confusing the users about what Tracker really is. For
example, the Ontologies section in that Features page is the last one,
like if it was a side product of Tracker, while the real side product is
FTS, which shouldn't be first in that page.

http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/features.html



3) The "Documentation" page includes a "How can I use it?" section,
where we show Tracker Search Bar and Search Tool; and only at the end of
that section one line just naming Totem and Nautilus plugins. Again,
this keeps on the confusion of Tracker being just a FTS tool.

How about adding more examples on how Tracker's RDF storage can be used
without using FTS?

http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/documentation.html



I really believe we should spend some time updating the Tracker website
to really explain what Tracker is. It is useless if we are the only ones
who know what it is :-)


Cheers!

-- 
Aleksander