[Pangloss] Functional spec

[Steve Purkis]

Hi Chris,

On Monday, April 7, 2003, at 10:13  pm, Chris Croome wrote:

> On Mon 07-Apr-2003 at 05:51:56PM +0100, Dan McQuillan wrote:
>>
>> 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.

That's probably the easiest option.


>> 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:

I disagree - I think one url is enough to start with, adding more may 
complicate the issue.


>   http://www.multikulti.org.uk:8080/zh/health/
>
> This would save pangloss having to do subject classification.

Not quite - the document isn't likely to contain all the subjects 
defined in Pangloss.



>> 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?

If you use the notes field, you can put whatever you like in it.


> 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

Hmm.. will look into them, but I'll mention now that I wasn't planning 
on supporting dublin core meta data.


>> 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

I think you're right - this is too much to start with.

-Steve