RE: Glossary help

If the user can display the document with more than one organization, I
don't think that it is necessary to worry too much about whether the
domains are really accurate or exhaustive.

-----Original Message-----
From: Hugo Haas [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 2:31 AM
To: Husband, Yin-Leng; Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
Subject: Re: Glossary help


* Husband, Yin-Leng <[email protected]> [2003-02-18 11:50+1100]
> >From the time I heard David Booth give the talk on RDF in Paris, I've
> felt that the WSA Glossary would be a good test of RDF applicability. 
> David agreed with me then that ideally, the Glossary is presented in 
> RDF format so that all W3C specifications can refer to a single 
> definition of common terms.
> 
> If RDF were used, one could then build in relationships between each 
> term and category.
> 
> Knowing that using RDF is idealistic and probably not practical in 
> terms of the amount of work, I would suggest that the glossary terms 
> be organized alphabetically, but for each term, there would be (at 
> least) two fields: Domains and Definition. Definition field gives the 
> definition of the term, domains field gives the domains within which 
> the term is relevant.
> 
> What do you think?

You may be interested to know that there actually is such a project at
W3C, that it will be presented at the Technical Plenary, and that I will
actually be presenting our problems in light of this.

So we may not be that far from doing so.

* Husband, Yin-Leng <[email protected]> [2003-02-18 13:59+1100]
> So I think there are (at least) two types of glossary users: 1. Those 
> who read sections of glossaries according to the category of interest,
> 2. Those who read an item of the glossary for clarification of the
item
> in the midst of perusing some other W3C document.
> 
> For type 2, I think just alphabetically ordering would suffice. For 
> type 1, some form of categorization is desirable. If the glossary were

> formatted as an XML document, and the domains field used to hold the 
> different categories to which the item pertains, then a user could use

> xpath or XSL Stylesheet to display terms relevant to specific 
> domain(s).
> 
> This reasoning is starting to look like going down the RDF path ...
> 
> What do you think?

So it seems that we do want to have two organizations, or maybe simply
just one and provide an index.

This domains idea is exactly what I had in mind when I talked about
categories. What is hard is coming up with a list of sensible domains,
and try to have something more or less exhaustive.

Technologically speaking, if we manage to know how to organize the
document, I can write XSLT style sheets to tranform the document into
appropriate shape and produce some handy XHTML.

With this overall-W3C RDF glossary, I am also optimistic about tools
which will help us do so.

If you have any proposal, please send them to the Working Group's list.
I don't want to lose some interesting thoughts about this. Apologies for
not doing so from the beginning, but the email went from "can you help?"
to vory interesting ideas very quickly. :-)

Regards,

Hugo

-- 
Hugo Haas - W3C
mailto:[email protected] - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/