Forum OpenACS Q&A: BBoard Vs Forums, i18n Vs SWS

I can't really give a good estimate on how much work is involved in the change. If you decide to do this, you might want to look at the bug-tracker package for reference as we upgraded it to using the CR recently. The relevant upgrade script is:

bug-tracker/sql/postgresql/upgrade-0.9d1-1.2d2.sql

Don't be deterred by the size of that upgrade script as it did a lot more than just the CR upgade 😊

It would be great to have the forums package use the content repository.  Ben felt strongly that he didn't not want to use the content repository for forums and I didn't disagree with him, though I regret it now.  The main reason I didn't make it an issue was that I was trying my best to avoid making our already poor working relationship worse, not because I agreed technically.

But I do bear part of the responsibility as I did agree with Ben's decision to not use the content repository.

I don't think rewriting it to use the CR would be that difficult, nor would writing upgrade scripts be too burdensome.  In 4.6.2 I ripped out the special "fs_simple_objects" type that Open Force put into file-storage  to avoid using the content repository for URLs, and replaced it with the already existing non-versionable "external link" type in the CR.  The upgrade script wasn't that hard to write ...

Claran ... if you folks want to undertake this task for 5.0 I would be willing to help with advice, etc, but won't have time to do any significant coding on it in the near future.

Here's a simplified example of kind of thing we did (I have more details if you want them):

create a "theme" table:
on qfs18 sqlplus enke_km/enke_km
create table mythemes
( query_id     number,
  theme     varchar2(2000),
  Weight     number
)
/

Create a Thesaurus index:
create index Thesaurus_idx on cr_revisions(title) indextype is ctxsys.context;

Generate themes from content (which bits of the taxonomy are relevant to some content):
/*  repeat for every piece of content
begin
ctx_doc.themes( index_name => 'Thesaurus_idx',
textkey => '714',
query_id => '714',
restab => 'mythemes'
);
end;
/

Look at the results:
select theme, weight from mythemes order by weight desc;
select query_id from mythemes order by weight desc;

I think we could do lots with this to improve searching and browsing of content:  Build taxonomy into search (done), link "topics of interest" or "skills" into it (under review), browsing of taxonomy (part of Oracle 9i), extending / adding taxonomies etc. (part of 9i).

We are currently converting OACS to use Oracle 9i as there is more advanced functionality available.

Here's the metalink entries all about it.
http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_gui.startup

So, although our forums are fairly new and we don't have much experience, I think we will make extended use of the categories. Since we use the forums for announcements and also sharing study materials to the students, many of the postings are done by ourselves, so we have it in our hands to use categories.

Also, we are using Postgres instead of Oracle, so "Oracle text themes" may not be available.

Most of those seem to have been used so far primarily or only as spam filters, but there have definitely been other applications (Extracting the interesting posts from Usenet, for example.)

Someone or other here also wrote a college thesis doing automatic classification of text in an OpenACS system, but I never read it and now I don't remember who that was or where it is.

There was also some old discussion of OpenCyc, which is of course quite different.

"Williams K., R. A. Calvo and D. Bell. Automatic Categorization of Questions for a Mathematics Education Service. Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference. Sydney, Australia. July 2003"

/Håkan

The thing is that sending the post is dead slow, for about 30sec. or so nothing happens, that's why I thought the line was cut or something and posted again.

It only happens after the last confirmation of the message. Is it because this thread is already quite long (<22 postings)?