Re: [Tracker] Tracker for networked home document management

[Aaron Whitehouse <lists whitehouse org nz>]

On 04/04/12 18:57, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:

> We are moving countries and have scanned all our paper documents into
> PDFs. We are looking for a simple document management system to index
> these many files and make them easier to tag, organise and find.
> Ideally, we would store the documents on our home server, and access
> them on our laptop(s) over the network.

Has anybody looked at creating a document management view that sits on 
top of the Tracker store?

Tracker seems brilliant to me and, as it says on your site, it just 
becomes more powerful as people write more miners etc for it.

At the moment, it primarily is useful as a very good search engine, as 
far as I can see. I love the idea of some of the cool extras like the 
FUSE filesystem for tags etc. Adding additional information about files 
into the database feels a little "bolted on" to Nautilus, and I think 
that is inevitable because Nautilus is primarily a file browser.

I think that an incredibly powerful advance would be to add a simple 
document management "view" on top of the Tracker Store. Even with 
nothing more, this could list the files that had been indexed, allow you 
to search and manage/view the file tags (in essence, a different way of 
doing what is already possible).

The advantages would come from the extras that you have in a document 
management system, primarily the additional metadata that people often 
enter into such a system. Logical fields would be the date of the 
document, who it was from and to, a title and/or a short description, a 
document type (which could be represented in tracker as a tag, eg 
"type-invoice") etc.

Having this as part of Tracker would mean that the document management 
side could re-use all the database, search engines, miners etc and could 
just provide a simple interface. On the flip side, it would make Tracker 
far more useful, as user-entered information about a document is likely 
to be a key field for searching (if something I'm searching for appears 
in a description I've entered, the document is very likely to be 
relevant) and would mean that Tracker's tags etc were used more.

A "Tracker GUI" along these lines could also be quite a good way to 
raise the project's profile, as I imagine it is far easier to gain media 
coverage for a desktop app than an infrastructure element. I've read a 
lot of reviews of personal document managers and never seen Tracker in 
there, yet it seems to me like Tracker is 90% of the way to being the 
best personal DMS of all (given its tight integration with the rest of 
my system).

All just my 2c, given I'm not currently in a position to write the code!

Thanks again for a wonderful tool.

Aaron