[Marble-devel] Intelligent parser for Marble

[Henry de Valence]

So basically it would be good if Marble's search bar had a parser
that searched intelligently. Right now, it will search for towns, and
now it also searches using OSM. But it would be good if it could also
recognize eg "43 39 00 N, 79 23 00 W" as a longitude/latitude
coordinate, or if it could use OSM for routemapping like "from 12
King Street West to 89 Queen Streen East" , or if it could someday do
tackat's suggestion of "deliver a pizza to tackat's house". Even if
that was a joke, it would be very cool. Or on a more realistic note,
Perhaps one could define local aliases like "tackat's house" =
"Behind the hot water pipes, Basement, Some Building,
Mönchengladbach, Germany" and then do "tackat's house to
$some_other_place". Maybe "Geocaches near 43 39 00 N, 79 23 00 W" and
then it shows stuff... There are a lot of possibilities IMO.

I think that it would be a good idea to make this work like the way
KRunner is, with each parser working in its own thread and reporting
back to the controller. The controller would give the parser a string
to parse, and the parsers would do their job, and then the parsers
would pass an object which represents the result back to the
controller.

This object would have at a minimum:
* A GeoDataModel of what the result was A value like
* Plasma::QueryMatch::Type which categorizes the result
    (no match, possible match, exact match, etc etc) and is used for
    sorting

There also needs to be a way of indicating to the user that one or
more parsers is still running, which alleviates the problem we have
now where the OSM search takes a long time but there's no indication
that it's still running. Maybe an icon next to "Search" that pulses
when there is something going on.

There is more that needs to be thought about it though, but I think
this would be cool.

hdevalence