[Bug-gnupedia] different architecture perhaps?

[Johan Pouwelse]

Hello,

The consensus on this list seem to be forming for a 1 datamodel for all
knowledge of humanity. The encyclopedia with 1 datamodel/DTD for storing all
sorts of articles does not capture the relation between knowledge. We could aim
our long term goals higher if we created specific encyclopedia's

An encyclopedia on a given topic needs a different datamodel, for example:
music.
With another developer I have created a encyclopedia of music that now contains
the names of more then 220.000 tracks. All stuff is OpenContent+GPL, see
http://www.musicbrainz.org.
We have a working system with voting in place for several months to correct
errors in the spelling and other errors. This music encyclopedia stores artist
names, their albums, tracks, the lyrics, karaoke info, acoustic fingerprint of a
file, etc.
This datamodel is unique to music.

Wouldn't it be great if we could create tools to build encyclopedia's.
The encyclopedia of web links, of physics, of conference, of TV listings, ...
It is perhaps not so hard as you might think. The dream of the semantic web may
then become a reality.
For my Ph.D. around this topic I published an article at a Usenix conference on
this subject. http://www.pds.twi.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/open_databases_final.ps

abstract:
On the WWW it is not possible to supplement existing web pages of other people
with
new information or a link to that information, because the WWW does not have a
standard method for write access. With write access, information can be added in
the right context, which eases searching. We therefore define Open Information
Pools: a collection of WWW based databases with public write access. By using
databases we add structure to the information. Each database deals with a
specific topic. We developed an architecture to support Open Information Pools.
Important elements in the architecture are the rating and moderation tools. With
these tools the user group is able to maintain and update the database and also
to prevent errors and abuse. We conducted measurements on operational rating and
moderation tools to show the validity of our idea. The study of Slashdot.org's
rating and moderation tools shows that insightful information is recognised
after only 37 minutes. We implemented a prototype of a true Open Information
Pool containing music information. This database contains biographies, audio CD
descriptions, audio CD cover pictures, lyrics of the songs with timing
information, and MIDI files. We developed several tools to create, insert and
search this database. 


Any comments on this would be great.

Greetings,
Johan.