RE: [Bug-gnupedia] different architecture perhaps?

[Duncan Lock]

        The consensus (and my opinion) is that we ought to be using XML for the
internal article format. One of the benefits of XML is that it is not only
extensible and flexible but self describing - the semantic web, if you like.
Using a basic generic content DTD you could establish a format for generic
articles and the add metadata, separately if you like, in RDF files,
describing the meaning of the articles and their attributes and relation to
other content. This way you can build 'webs' of metadata which describe your
content, which remains pristine and easily reusable, in any way you like.
        This would allow any kind of information to be stored meaningfully in 
your
content base.
        On the subject of write access, se WEBDAV which is HTTP-RW if you like 
and
an open w3c standard, as are XML and RDF. I don't think it is necessary to
create new tools for this kind of job. It seems to me that all the tools we
need (for content storage and metadata) have been created for us.

Dunc.

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
Behalf Of Johan Pouwelse
Sent: 18 January 2001 19:53
To: address@hidden
Subject: [Bug-gnupedia] different architecture perhaps?


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.

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