Re: [Tracker] Guessing metadata and retrieval from external resources

["Daniel O'Connor" <daniel oconnor gmail com>]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Age Bosma <agebosma gmail com> wrote:

Hi,

As far as I understand it is that Tracker currently only sticks to
collecting meta-data which can be retrieved from the actual files.

Would it be an idea to extend this concept by supplementing the metadata
which could not be determined from a file with info from external
resources? And/or intelligent guessing for that matter?

E.g. we have a movie with no tags like title, director, etc. We do have
a file name though.
In a lot of cases the movie title can be subtracted from it. This could
be added to the tracker metadata, followed by requesting the director of
a movie from an external resource like IMDB.
The same would go for the language of a file like a movie or subtitle,
where a language code is included in a file name.
A different approach can be taken with music. A audio fingerprint can be
determined, followed by using that to retrieve the additional meta-data
from MusicBrainz.

The external and guessed meta-data should be stored separate from the
normal meta-data stored by Tracker, marked as an external
title/director/... tag.
It is then up to an application to decide what to use. I.e. normal title
present? Use it. No title present but an external title present? Use
that one if you like.

Why would one want this? Often more info than can be extracted from
files is appreciated. It will prevent applications from having to
reinvent the wheel, deviating from Tracker as their meta-data source
because it does not have the information.

I did some tinkering to basically interact with XMBC web services and push metadata into tracker along these lines:
http://clockwerx.blogspot.com/2011/01/xbmc-vs-boxee-vs-file-browsers.html 

I don't think I bothered publishing the code; as it was just a shell script to explore an idea.
Unfortunately; there were few areas in gnome at the time which could use the additional data; so there wasn't much utility in it at the time.