Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site utcsri.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!mason From: mason@utcsri.UUCP (Dave Mason) Newsgroups: net.news.group Subject: Keyword based news Message-ID: <1419@utcsri.UUCP> Date: Sat, 21-Sep-85 18:03:26 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsri.1419 Posted: Sat Sep 21 18:03:26 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 21-Sep-85 18:20:42 EDT References: <494@klipper.UUCP> <3500008@ccvaxa> <2168@ukma.UUCP> <269@steinmetz.UUCP> <16460@watmath.UUCP> Reply-To: mason@utcsri.UUCP (Dave mason) Organization: University of Toronto/Ryerson Polytechnic Institute Lines: 50 Keywords: keywords news selection Summary: Keyword basing proposals and problems I also am coming to believe a keyword based system is correct. A couple of ideas follow, but first I must point out a problem. My understanding is that many sites recieve only a part of the postings (particularly Europe, Australia) because of transmission costs. Currently this is based on news groups. If these disappear it MAY be more difficult for them to get the articles they are interested in without the drivel. The only solution I can see is that they recieve all articles with keywords not on a list, with a report being produced each day of new keywords that have arrived, which could be added to the censor list. ....maybe it's not as bad a problem as I thought. One thing that I think is critical to the use of key words is that the author of an article must choose her own keywords, even if following-up. If this is not done, the situation will be little better than at present with the title becoming totally meaningless. The big advantages of (correctly chosen) keywords are: 1) we would not have parallel discussions going on in different news groups. Therefore we could read all the articles of interest to us without scanning the universe. 2) as discussions drifted away from our interests, we would not be sucked along behind them (although some simple mechanism for following a discussion as it drifts might be handy. The biggest question it seems to me is how to present the discussions to the reader. I suggest that we could define 'interest trees' along the lines of os | operating_system !mvs !cpm !bugs unix 4.2bsd bugs bugs cpm internals This would present: 1) os articles (however spelled) that dealt with anything but mvs, unix, bugs or cpm 2) os & unix articles not about 4.2bsd or bugs 3) os & unix & 4.2bsd articles not about bugs 4) os & unix & 4.2bsd & bugs 5) os & unix & bugs 6) os & cpm & internals where of course once seen, an article would not reappear unless you postponed it (to another group or another time). Comments welcome. -- Usenet: {dalcs dciem garfield musocs qucis sask titan trigraph ubc-vision utzoo watmath allegra cornell decvax decwrl ihnp4 uw-beaver} !utcsri!mason Dave Mason, U. Toronto CSRI CSNET: mason@Toronto ARPA: mason%Toronto@CSNet-Relay