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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.
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