Michael: By all means lets put together some uses cases
and do some wireframes. Where would you like to start?
Let's start with your first two ideas:
1) Query optimization through improved contextualization
(determining the knowledge domain of the query) before
submitting it.
2) Improved presentation of query result sets through
chunking results to search context(s) (organizing the
presentation of search results according to the possible
context(s) of the query).
It seems to me that these two are the simplest to think about
first, since they need only to interface with search and not any
other part of OpenACS. I'm not really clear on how hard (3) would
be or how necessary it is for achieving (1) and (2), and I'm fairly
certain that (4) would require more work.
OK, so with that in mind, how would you envision "query
optimization" to work? What's it like from the user's perspective?
Are there examples of existing pre-search dialogs you can point
to as similar?
Likewise, how do you picture the "chunking" of results into
"contexts"? How is that like or unlike search results pages that
are out there now? For example, I'm not really clear yet on how,
from a user's perspective "a collection of phrases and keywords
grouped into the smallest possible number of headings" differs
from Yahoo! or from Northern Light.
BTW, according to the latest Sourceforge update, it looks like
we will have plenty of time to think this through:
Although many of the constants with incomplete minimal
definitions do have many other assertions in the Cyc knowledge
base, the minimal definitions are a prerequisite for any release
of OpenCyc. This should not affect the release date of OpenCyc
1.0 (currently slated for delivery before the end of 2001), but it will
delay the open beta release of OpenCyc 0.9B for several
months. New dates for OpenCyc 0.9B will be provided as they
become available.
