Re: [Tracker] Tracker for networked home document management

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 28/04/12 07:04, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:
> On 04/04/12 18:57, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:

Hello,

> > 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?

There are a few things here you may not know of:

1. tracker-needle (it comes packaged with Tracker)

http://blogs.gnome.org/mr/2011/10/06/tracker-needle-with-improved-tagging/

2. tracker search extension:
   https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/284/tracker-search/

3. gnome-documents (as Debarshi Ray pointed out):
   https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Documents

> 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.

Thank you.

> 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

There is an extension for tagging in Nautilus available in some repos.

> into the database feels a little "bolted on" to Nautilus, and I think
> that is inevitable because Nautilus is primarily a file browser.

Yes, I would prefer one of two things here (or perhaps both):

- Integration with Nautilus searching
- Integration with GNOME shell (which is demonstrated above)

> 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.

Indeed.

> 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).

Tracker is really an "under the hood" technology. I wouldn't expect it 
to make much news generally. But it is enjoyed by many like yourself.

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

No problem, your ideas and input are interesting and appreciated. Thank you.

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.