Forum OpenACS Development: User Categorization

What do we do with email? I guess it depends on how much you get. But more than a few of us that frequent this wonderful web community receive quite a few, and a good percentage are directly from this bboard. But what happens after we get the email? Besides reading it, or at least skimming, I, at least, move them to a special folder (uh, actually a filter does that). However not all messages are the same, and I usually want to remember some special message or thread. I know this at the time, but later I forget exactly, and the message is anyway stored with all other OACS messages. Then there is the fear of losing this jumble of email messages completely. Anyway, they are on the website, I guess I can find it again if I really need to. And here is the point.

Why can't the website maintain my favorite messages and threads? If I am really open, why can I not share my culled messages with the rest of the community? I would like to be able to arrange messages in my own categories, and in whatever order seems useful at the time. From an operational perspective, I should be able to click on a link in the email of the message to add this message/thread to my personal list. I should be able to visit my list occasionally and arrange or rearrange the list. Although email is absolutely wonderful in timely notification, most of us wish to remember a few key pieces of data, and somehow email clients are a little lacking in friendliness in this regard.

So these are just my thoughts, implementation should not be too hard.

David's suggestion of use of Javascript would be a good use of Javascript IMHO. The user wouldn't have to have it enabled to use the site, for he/she could always open another window and go to /favorites (or wherever the package would be mounted on) and copy/paste the URL and finish the process.

I'm thinking that we might not want to limit ourselves to bboard messages. What if the user wants to add a certain album in the photo-album to his "favorites"? And how about that mp3 page from the mp3 jukebox module?

My thinking is that we want to make this "favorites" module (bookmark may be another good word, but there is a bookmark module already, we could extend it, but I haven't looked at it yet) available to every page of the site without having to modify all other modules.

We could do this by modifying the master default template for example,  having it add a link to the bottom of the page.

Each package, module or piece of the OACS would have its own page with links to the packages documentation, SDM page and download page. In addition, there would be a place where bookmarks to revelant threads in the bboards could be made. This would all be in the interest of providing a central location for users and developers to access information quickly.

The flow might work like this. A developer is interested in the categories module. He goes to developer.openacs.org and is directed to the categories page on the site. At that page, he RTFMs the docs on categories. Not finding his answer there, he goes to the bookmarks section and can view all the threads that have discussed the design, problems or other issues related to the categories module. Not finding his answer there, he posts a follow up question on one of the threads or starts a new thread on the bboards.

Does that make sense?

talli

[1] https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0003xq&topic_id=12&topic=OpenACS%204%2e0%20Design

The "add a bookmark to this thread" feature described sounds pretty interesting, though that would be as much for bboard developers to work on as for me. Right now, I've got an XML-RPC interface to the OpenACS 3.X module "with the hood up"...it mostly works, but I put it on hold a while back intending to rewrite the whole thing into OpenACS 4 once we released.

Anyone who's interested in doing the Javascript stuff can have at it...I'm no JS guru (or even a wannabe). Feel free to email me patches, talk to Don (or whoever) about commit privs, etc. Once we've released the OpenACS 4 beta, I'll probably start looking at the bookmarks code wholesale again, with an eye towards an API (XML-RPC or otherwise) for other modules (and client apps...my test app is wxPython!) to "hook into".

And don't worry, I certainly didn't mean to imply that that's the only way to do it. In fact, I was mainly responding to a couple of the later messages that described using the bookmarks module. OTOH, remember that almost anything in OpenACS is, in effect, a URL, since that's how you access it (via the Web). So bookmarks could make sense in a way.

OTGH (we'll see how many Niven/Pournelle fans we've got here) ... the requirements don't map precisely onto bookmarks. Perhaps a totally separate module, with some similarities to bookmarks, better hooks to the CR, etc., is needed. I see a itch that someone might scratch here...*grin*

What I was thinking is that Objects are relatively well defined types. Usually they are grouped togeather in some kind of useful interface. Maybe someone wants to remember the content of that object, more than the specific interface, or produce their own interface to the object. I tend to write notes on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper, and stacks of this pile up around my desk. Someone else is sure to use post-it notes. Now this idea is more complicated because we have different types of objects, but maybe this provides an opportunity for synthesis. A photo, a bookmark, a bboard posting. I don't want the entire thread, just the postings, but maybe some link could bring the user to the original (or multiple) places where this content is posted.

I think of a simple experiment I happened to try in college. Some industrious student had made poster boards for a lecture he was giving. I was not able to figure out what the topic was. These posters had abstract messages, questions. All I did was to thumb-tack one of these to one of those mobile poster thingies. What happened is that other students would wander by and see this quite out of place sign and they would start writing their own responses on the poster. Soon, responses to the responses would show up. Occasionally I would change the poster for a new one from the same lecture. Eventually I started my own nonsense posters. The point is that the responses can be quite amazing, and certainly are interesting. This is more like stream of thought, which might not fit into the regular discussion but could be interesting.

So I am thinking of a separate area that would allow users to orgainze material how they see fit, and to add commentary.

If categorization like this is going to be implemented on a public server, then I'd like to see the idea of popularity implemented -- show me popular links, concepts, objects, people, etc. For example, I can find out that DonB posts a lot, so maybe I'd like to "subscribe" to DonB, not just a thread or content object. (In reality, popularity is an n-dimensional concept, needing both machine-generated values (for initial seeding, for example), with human generated values (which over time, may be more useful)).

A shared bookmark manager module might evaluate all of the URIs posted by all contributors and post a list of popular bookmarks; evaluation of multiple categorization trees can be used as input to create a shared vocabulary for describing content that can be leveraged across many uses of the system, especially with the ability to explicitly create knowlege networks and attach them to category nodes as searchable metadata. This gets even more interesting with the integration of tools like WordNet and OpenCyc as pre-processors providing input for openFTS.

Finally, I urge a kind of stochastic processing that will bring less popular items to the top of the list for evaluation. One of the problems with popularity systems (e.g., Google PageRank, DirectHit) is that popular items tend to get more popular, while less popular items tend to get less popular.