SC - eggs? (good recipe :-)

[KriSiena@aol.com]

I've changed the subject to "OT-Automated search problems" to warn off the
disinterested.

Your people problem is the compartmentalization of knowledge in areas of
expertise.  In general, humanists seem to disdain engineering and mathmatics
skills while technologists prefer not to be involved with things that can
not be quantified.  The compartmentalization places the algorithms and data
structures under the technologists and some of the interesting problems
under the humanists and leaves the two sides miscommunicating their biases
in their particular jargon or job cant.

Your physical problem is that the tools are designed to handle linear,
structured, or parameterized data.  Your subject data, documents, are
anything but.  Most of the currently available search engines use keywords
for crude content searches.  Keyword searchs require massive indexing
without any great consideration of context or meaning.  Boolean searches on
keywords can improve your context hits, but most people don't think in
Boolean terms, natural language doesn't parse to Boolean very well, and some
of the more popular search engines may not support Boolean searches (I was
cursed by one of these yesterday).  

Context searches are more difficult because most language is imprecise and
the liguistic structures don't translate readily into usable mathmatic
equations.  Context relationships are more complex that keywords, so the
indexes to handle it will probably be even more massive and the processing
logic less linear.

I also thought the Florilegium would make a good test subject, but I would
ask for a copy of it.  Hitting a production server with experimental search
software is bad form.  

Bear

> Very interesting topic, indeed. The problem is we have a gap between
> technowizards and humanists. <clipped>
> Yours
> Ana 
> 
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