-----Original Message----- From: Michael Bernstein [mailto:mbernstein@profitscape.net] Sent: Monday, September 13, 1999 2:12 PM To: Michel Pelletier Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Something odd about ZCatalog...
Hmm, interesting. A controlled vocabulary (complete with synonyms and stemming) would be a very interesting product. few (if any) automated products exist for this in the web application space. I've been interested in controlled vocabularies for a while now, ever since I read 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web' by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565922824/)
What I would like to see is an intelligent 'stock' vocab object for several languages. We are still incepting this project, however, I cannot make any delivery promises. Stopping, stemming, and understanding of international characters (excluding multi-byte, at least at first) would be big pluses.
However I was disappointed at the time that all such vocabularies had to be created and maintained by hand, even if you were using an existing one (say from an online glossary),
This is what I was thinking, what else did you have in mind? Unless you can teach a computer to read and understand context and applicability of words, I don't see how it can be automated. It might make sense to have a user interface where the manager can 'ask' the catalog if a word will be stopped or not, and be given the option to add or remove the question from the catalog, ala: Manager: Is 'Many' a stop word? Catalog: Yes, would you like to remove Many as a stopword? Manger: Yes. Is 'antidisestablishtarianism' a stopword? Catalog: No, would you like me to add it as a stopword? Given this interactivity, it might be at least more useful than a flat list of words you can edit.
I've never had a client that would spring for creating a vocabulary maintenance tool. ('why do we need that?').
That's reasuring. Maybe since you understand how hard it is, *you* can spring for it? ;)
With a controlled vocabulary for cataloging and retreiving objects, and Topics to arange objects into arbitrary heirarchies, Zope could credibly claim to have one of the most advanced Web Content Management Sytems on the market.
Wait, I thought it was allready? -Michel