[Pangloss] Functional spec

[Chris Croome]

Hi

Picking up on some of these points...

On Mon 07-Apr-2003 at 05:51:56PM +0100, Dan McQuillan wrote:
> 
> USER?
> my main query is: who is the ordinary User?
> 
> i think i'm not sure because for multikulti keywords are currently a 'behind
> the scenes' matter between administrator, translator & proofreader. 
> 
> are you imagining pangloss being a general feature of a site that a user can
> interrogate seperate of any specific translated text? 
> 
> if so i have 2 points:
> - for multikulti, the translations of the keywords may be an important
> resource for our sustainability, so we might want general access to the
> keywords to be by subscription. 
> (from your spec i understand that a user would still have to have priviliges
> to access the keywords)

This wouldn't be a problem, pangloss could be set up so that it's
username/passwd protected using HTTP authentication, further more
the links from the multikulti site could be set so that they are
only available for editors.

> - we might consider tagging the keywords by subject area, and for this to be
> a filter for a search 
> 
> SUBJECT TAGGING?
> Tagging by subject area could also be useful for translators. 
> i'm imagining it might be useful for a translator to see, for example, all
> health terms, in case there's anything in the list that would give them
> ideas on how to translate a new but related term.
> I'll check this out with Njomeza and see what she thinks. 

On this I think it would be better if one could give pangloss
multiple documents. For example it would be nice to say on the query
string that the glossery for this document and all child documents
is wanted:

  http://www.multikulti.org.uk:8080/zh/health/

This would save pangloss having to do subject classification.

> LONG VERSIONS?
> Another thought is whether we should expand the definitions to short-version
> and long-version.
> The short-version would be the one that replaces the English term in the
> text itself. The longer version might be a more heuristic explanation. 
> I'll also ask Njomeza about whether she thinks this is a good idea.
> It may not be important/necessary, as currently we're only paying
> translators to translate keywords, not to write an essay about each one ;-)

This gets complicated because you you might also want the
description in multiple languages?

I think that the long-version should be thought of as the
dc:description and the short-version as the dc:title of the item.

  http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#title

  http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#description

> Also, if we have a word like 'disabled' in the keywords already, and we have
> 'disability' in the new text, would the processing pick that up and give the
> translation of 'disabled' in the glossary?
> (That might be asking a bit much, but maybe not.)

This might be too much to start with. This could be a list of
alternatives (again would have to be multi-linugal?),
dc:alternative:

  http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#alternative
 
Or a RDF see also:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_seealso

Chris

-- 
Chris Croome                               <chris at webarchitects.co.uk>
web design                             http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/ 
web content management                               http://mkdoc.com/