Re: Ping!

Wolfgang Müller wrote:
> Thanks for your quick answer.
>
>   
>> I take you point, but this is something that I am quite likely to have
>> time to look at - on the scale of "some time this year". If we are to go
>> down that path, we need to kick around some ideas on how we would like
>> such a system to work.
>>     
>
> I have thought about this. After my experience with c libraries as plugins, I 
> am a bit weary. Some recent problems we had are still related to plugins. 
> People have to versions of a lib floating around, and libtool picks the wrong 
> one. 
>
> I would suggest that the feature extractors are programs that read from stdin 
> a list of urls and output a list of file locations via stdout. After 
> indexing, these locations are fed to something that aggregates the indexing 
> data and adjusts the config.
>
> This would be slightly hackish, but fast and flexible and it would be 
> low-impact on the code.
>   
Yes. I agree that this seems a sensible approach. I would also be keen 
to see some MRML extensions to support some basic descriptions of the 
feature groups that go with a collection, most importantly the way 
similarity should be calculated for the feature group (e.g. histogram 
intersection, Euclidean distance, tf.idf, etc.)

It would be good to think about this over the next few weeks/months. I 
think an extension in this direction would really improve the usability 
of the framework (cf. the "symbols discussion earlier today). There 
could be a default set of provided similarity calculators (based on what 
is already there), and perhaps a provision for users to provide others 
(possibly plugins again, but perhaps also by providing subclasses and 
editing a nice clear source file that delegates these things).

Just some thoughts.

Regards,

David



-- 
Dr David McG. Squire,  Senior Lecturer, on sabbatical in 2006
Caulfield School of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia
CRICOS Provider No. 00008C       http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~davids/