- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 10:27:04 +1000
- To: wai-xtech <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Responding to Gregg's original proposal and Al's comments, often the author-specified dictionaries may not be what the user needs. Rather, the user typically requires a certain type of dictionary, for example a multilingual dictionary providing translations or definitions in a preferred language. These can be radically different from whatever dictionaries the author has chosen. Furthermore, as Al indicated, a list of available definitions is insufficient; what is required, rather, is the correct definition. My proposal is to attach metadata to the content, or parts of the content, that specifies subject descriptors taken from a controlled vocabulary, such as appear in bibliographic records. Downstream software (i.e., server-side or client-side tools) can then make use of this classification scheme, together with the user's preferences regarding languages and dictionaries, to establish a suitable list of dictionaries to be looked up, and an appropriate search order. A typical dictionary also categorizes definitions by subject matter. To the extent that this is achieved, it enables the correct definition to be programmatically determined. For example, the word "field" has an entirely different meaning in an article on agriculture to that which it conveys in an algebra textbook. If the content is labelled in metadata as related to algebra, the retrieval software can either search a mathematics dictionary for the precise, technical definition, or find it in a more general dictionary, provided that the latter is appropriately marked up to distinguish mathematical definitions from the remaining alternatives. This suggested approach could of course be combined with direct specification of dictionaries by the author; the two proposals are by no means mutually exclusive.
Received on Tuesday, 10 August 2004 00:27:10 UTC