Re: [xml-dev] XML for Video, Pizza Shops & TakeOut

[team refind <netography@refind.org>]

on 10/18/01 8:54 PM, Marcus Carr at mrc@allette.com.au wrote:
> David Lyon wrote:
> 
>> For a few hundred bucks cost, don't you think it would be really cool to have
>> a console in your hotel room to do the ordering from in a language that you
>> understand.
> 
> I guess it would be cooler than using the phone book or the menus in the room,
> but the interest would dry up pretty quickly when the restaurant realised that
> they had to change the fish of the day from blackened barramundi to ocean
> trout in fennel sauce in 27 languages. (Yes, you could automate the
transliteration
> after all, it worked pretty well for my daughter's bike...) The cost wouldn't
> be in the device, it would be in the maintenance of the system as a whole.

such a system must do more than language transliteration. A well designed
system must also handle equivalences and slang to get all those that avoided
the web to even believe that computer searching is interesting.

Merchants just select the words/phrases they want to end up in a their xml
file (an interface maps the words to actual leaf/branches (ie Xpaths from an
classification hierarchy), so that whenever a query is executed, such things
become possible.

can't think of a pizza analogy but let's use "hot-dogs". In Quebec, we call
them "steamies".  Other english words are "frankfurters", "foot-longs",
etc.. 

if we are going to go through the trouble of getting people to supply
tagged meta-data , we should at least solve these problems to make it
possible to contribute and query; using their respective mother tongues.


--dz
team refind