Really sorry for the screw up there ...<br><br>Hi all,<br> <br>The general idea of the project is an application that will scan barcode image and than search stores on web and local stores for prices , reviews etc ..<br>
As part of the project the first thing was to test out maemo-barcode toolkit . Sadly I was not able to run it on my SBOX . Although I did do some bug fixes on it . It still didn't seem to work.<br><br>We also evaluated some other toolkits on SBOX and zbar seemed to run fine(<a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">http://zbar.sourceforge.net/</a>)<br>
<br>zbar gives us some of the features that we were looking for i.e<br>1. Almost the same speed of decoding for different types of barcode<br>2.1D(ean and upc) as well as 2d barcode scanning<br>3.Python bindings .<br>So I have <b>recommended to use zbar </b>. If there is work required in terms of image quality perhaps it can be developed as a <b>seperate independent module using Image Magick or PIL</b><br>
<br>The second part of the project .. ie that of <b>price comparison</b> is to be done using server side scripts.<br>As a beginning to this i have started adding code to get product title for a particular barcode.<br>The reason to use product titles is because we would need to search many <b>heterogenous databases </b>and I think product titles would make the job easier in this regard . <b>Not all databases or systems provide the capability to search by upc or ean no.<br>
<br></b>Their are as far as i can see two methods for price comparison . This part we have decided should be done in a manner that it is easier for <b>merchants to add their feeds/database/other such stuff <br> </b><br>
For <b>web stores</b> we could <b>create a crawler using Yahoo Boss API </b>. Although I would wonder if it can be optimized in such a manner that it is even able to extract price information and reviews etc<br><br>On the side of <b>local stores and feeds</b> -<br>
We could have our own specification for the feed .. but this might be too complicated for small local stores ..<br>The problem with local stores and feeds would be that they would tend to be very heterogenous thus we require a search system that is flexible ... <br>
For this I think we should do a full text search(perhaps using pyLucene) on the databases/feeds we recieve but again question is can we optimize this kind of search to the level that we can get price info and reviews etc <br>
<br>The next apart of course would be to write the client side for price comparison and UI<br><br>P.S The ideas for price comparison are major thought waves that perhaps need to be orgainized and understood better. Also please add recommendations and other such input.<br>
Also although i have experimented a bit with BOSS i have no clue about pyLucene so please feel free to add warnings about the kind and load of work involved and <b>tutorials/links/projects </b>on the two topics . <br><br>
Thanks<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:31 AM, Amit Sethi <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:amit.pureenergy@gmail.com" target="_blank">amit.pureenergy@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>Hi all ,<br><font color="#888888"><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>A-M-I-T S|S<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>A-M-I-T S|S<br>