Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 10:55:43 +1100

I too would like to see a system design discussed. Specific examples would be good.

As a start, how about taking a specific document and comparing possible methods on encoding, storage, searching, etc? These are generalised concepts.

We could then move on to referring to specific points (paragraphs, lines, sentences, words), annotating the document, versioning, summarisation, etc?

Anyone have a list of features we can test against to see if we meet all the requirements?

At the moment I'm leaning towards an xml encoding style as that is going to be wide spread and well understood with such work as cml (chemical markup language) which someone mentioned earlier.

Does anyone know of any work in other fields using xml to encode their own needs in xml?

Encoding is all well and good, but one of the main problems I think we're going to face once the data has been retrieved is to present/display it in a reconisable form to the user. Do we need (sub-)interpreters for every use of xml? Or, can we encode presentation infomation with, by reference, the document. The emerging uses of xml present us with the realization that extensible also has to apply to the viewing mechanism.

Taking a quick glance at cml...

...it seems that they rely on java to interprete and display cml. This is an improvement over the mess of plug-ins that could have been relied upon, but is there a method that exists or that could be developed that does not rely on executable code?

While writing this I went searching for some possible examples and came across the following...

As usual I seem to have half answers which lead to many more question than I can find answers for. If I had twice as many hours in a day I still doubt I could read all that is necessary. This alone seems to suggest the need for a DKR with summaries and collaboration with others.

Sincerely,

Jeff

Jeff Miller
jeffm@dynamite.com.au