Re: knowledge base - was Re: RFC: mod_perl 2.0 documentation project
On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Jim Smith wrote: On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 10:45:43AM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Jim Smith wrote: On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 10:16:26PM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: Just some pseudo-random ideation boiling down to let's use mod_perl to buils a knowledge base both to demonstrate it's power and to serve the community. I like the idea!!! If we can come up with a proposal for a generic knowledge base product that would be useful in an IT environment, I can probably devote some of my work to it -- this is something I've been wanting to put together at work for customers and our help desk people but haven't had time yet to get it all together. I'll have more time in September after the students return. go ahead and be the first to propose Jim :) Ok... here are some of my initial thoughts. We need to be able to enter arbitrary documents, so I suggest DocBook as the standard format. This handles articles, books, reference pages, etc., in a well-defined manner. It also allows us to transform to other formats without much of a problem. We can even consider AxKit for at least part of the web interface. We would want to have different sections for documents that are not related. For example, we (here at TAMU) could use a section on Unix, another on Mac, and yet another on Windows systems. Or we could divide it up by services. The different sections would not expect overlap in keyword - content mapping, so we could have an AI::Catagorize object for each section that could provide a default set of keywords. As we entered documents, those objects could learn which keywords were appropriate. We would want to have documents in multiple catagories. This might require the person entering the document enter multiple sets of keywords, one per section. We would need to index on keyword so people could quickly find the documents. Perhaps even a catelogue-style interface for browsing that would be based on keyword categories. This would require some work. (Broad categories are indicated by the presence of certain keywords, or by a weighted average so a document having all but a couple of the appropriate keywords won't be dropped from that category.) Documents shouldn't have to be entered via the web interface, though they could be. We could provide a set of web-page templates for each of the DocBook formats (well, the small ones anyway - don't want to write a book via a web interface). Might want to even integrate with WebDAV and a repository. We probably want to set up a SourceForge project if this is a go. Any ideas on names? This all sounds cool. I have a few concerns with this proposal: - source documents living under modperl cvs are to be written in POD. The project that you suggest should be able to accept this and other formats as a source. Afterwards it can convert it to many other formats. Matt has already done some work on porting PODs into XML. - where the actual converted knowledge base will be hosted? I mean who will host the production version? It's possible that we can get a machine at apache.org, but this is one of the things to worry about. If things need to be dynamically generated, we cannot do this from the same machine the modperl-site is hosted on (daedalus). - we need someone to commit to lead the project, or things would never take off just like it has happened before. Now to see if I can get my boss to support me spending time on such a project :) I hope he does. Really! _ Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://eXtropia.com/ http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
Re: knowledge base - was Re: RFC: mod_perl 2.0 documentation project
On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 07:31:11PM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: This all sounds cool. I have a few concerns with this proposal: - source documents living under modperl cvs are to be written in POD. The project that you suggest should be able to accept this and other formats as a source. Afterwards it can convert it to many other formats. Matt has already done some work on porting PODs into XML. I don't see this as a problem. I was just picking a format out of the air as a starting point. TMTOWTDI and PCDAA (Perl Can Do Almost Anything). - where the actual converted knowledge base will be hosted? I mean who will host the production version? It's possible that we can get a machine at apache.org, but this is one of the things to worry about. If things need to be dynamically generated, we cannot do this from the same machine the modperl-site is hosted on (daedalus). I can't answer that at the moment. - we need someone to commit to lead the project, or things would never take off just like it has happened before. Well, I can lead the code development, but I can't commit to anything more than that at the moment. I won't be able to do even that until after the semester starts (classes start 27 Aug, we have several things to get done before then). Now to see if I can get my boss to support me spending time on such a project :) I hope he does. Really! He was very receptive yesterday evening. Wants to see a proposal (what TAMU would be committing to) before giving the final go ahead. We will probably need to involve our helpdesk people in some of the user-interface design. We will need a design document before coding so we know what we're aiming at. I can lead on that. --James
Re: knowledge base - was Re: RFC: mod_perl 2.0 documentation project
On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Jim Smith wrote: On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 07:31:11PM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: This all sounds cool. I have a few concerns with this proposal: - source documents living under modperl cvs are to be written in POD. The project that you suggest should be able to accept this and other formats as a source. Afterwards it can convert it to many other formats. Matt has already done some work on porting PODs into XML. I don't see this as a problem. I was just picking a format out of the air as a starting point. TMTOWTDI and PCDAA (Perl Can Do Almost Anything). that's cool. - where the actual converted knowledge base will be hosted? I mean who will host the production version? It's possible that we can get a machine at apache.org, but this is one of the things to worry about. If things need to be dynamically generated, we cannot do this from the same machine the modperl-site is hosted on (daedalus). I can't answer that at the moment. We can start worrying about that later, once we get something to show. I hope ASF can support that and may be use this project for other ASF projects if something really cool and/or useful will be produced. - we need someone to commit to lead the project, or things would never take off just like it has happened before. Well, I can lead the code development, but I can't commit to anything more than that at the moment. I won't be able to do even that until after the semester starts (classes start 27 Aug, we have several things to get done before then). Oh, that's absolutely fine. We aren't in hurry at all. We have not many docs written yet anyway. This is something that we should do in parallel with the actual docs writing. Now to see if I can get my boss to support me spending time on such a project :) I hope he does. Really! He was very receptive yesterday evening. Wants to see a proposal (what TAMU would be committing to) before giving the final go ahead. We will probably need to involve our helpdesk people in some of the user-interface design. We will need a design document before coding so we know what we're aiming at. I can lead on that. Fantastic. We can discuss things here. If the discussion becomes to heavy and getting unrelated to mod_perl list, we can move it elsewhere. e.g. [EMAIL PROTECTED] or if you host the project on sourceforge, we can use their list. _ Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://eXtropia.com/ http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
Re: knowledge base - was Re: RFC: mod_perl 2.0 documentation project
On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 10:45:43AM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Jim Smith wrote: On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 10:16:26PM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: Just some pseudo-random ideation boiling down to let's use mod_perl to buils a knowledge base both to demonstrate it's power and to serve the community. I like the idea!!! If we can come up with a proposal for a generic knowledge base product that would be useful in an IT environment, I can probably devote some of my work to it -- this is something I've been wanting to put together at work for customers and our help desk people but haven't had time yet to get it all together. I'll have more time in September after the students return. go ahead and be the first to propose Jim :) Ok... here are some of my initial thoughts. We need to be able to enter arbitrary documents, so I suggest DocBook as the standard format. This handles articles, books, reference pages, etc., in a well-defined manner. It also allows us to transform to other formats without much of a problem. We can even consider AxKit for at least part of the web interface. We would want to have different sections for documents that are not related. For example, we (here at TAMU) could use a section on Unix, another on Mac, and yet another on Windows systems. Or we could divide it up by services. The different sections would not expect overlap in keyword - content mapping, so we could have an AI::Catagorize object for each section that could provide a default set of keywords. As we entered documents, those objects could learn which keywords were appropriate. We would want to have documents in multiple catagories. This might require the person entering the document enter multiple sets of keywords, one per section. We would need to index on keyword so people could quickly find the documents. Perhaps even a catelogue-style interface for browsing that would be based on keyword categories. This would require some work. (Broad categories are indicated by the presence of certain keywords, or by a weighted average so a document having all but a couple of the appropriate keywords won't be dropped from that category.) Documents shouldn't have to be entered via the web interface, though they could be. We could provide a set of web-page templates for each of the DocBook formats (well, the small ones anyway - don't want to write a book via a web interface). Might want to even integrate with WebDAV and a repository. We probably want to set up a SourceForge project if this is a go. Any ideas on names? Now to see if I can get my boss to support me spending time on such a project :) --jim
Re: knowledge base - was Re: RFC: mod_perl 2.0 documentation project
On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Jim Smith wrote: On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 10:16:26PM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: Just some pseudo-random ideation boiling down to let's use mod_perl to buils a knowledge base both to demonstrate it's power and to serve the community. I like the idea!!! If we can come up with a proposal for a generic knowledge base product that would be useful in an IT environment, I can probably devote some of my work to it -- this is something I've been wanting to put together at work for customers and our help desk people but haven't had time yet to get it all together. I'll have more time in September after the students return. go ahead and be the first to propose Jim :) _ Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://eXtropia.com/ http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
