As Bob Glushko likes to say, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Let's _first_ get the tagged metadata up and make that profitable, because then someone will determine if it's worth the additional effort to do the transl(iter)ation. Cool doesn't cut it unless there's eventually some ROI. The higher you raise the bar for an initial implementation, the less likely you are to see it happen - and also the more likely that the result was undesireable. Start small and evolve.
Matthew
> -----Original Message-----
> From: team refind [mailto:netography@refind.org]
> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 7:23 PM
> To: Marcus Carr; david@globaltradedesk.com
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] XML for Video, Pizza Shops & TakeOut
>
>
> 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
>
>
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